Stranger Things Fails To Match Squid Game’s Impressive Record

Although it’s safe to say that Stranger Things season four was a huge hit with fans - and a massive win for Netflix - it wasn’t quite able to take the crown from Squid Game for the most-watched season ever. 

The fourth season, which was released in two volumes, racked up an incredible 1.4 billion hours of viewing during its first 28 days, which was enough to earn it the title of the most watched ever English-language season for Netflix.

But even those eye-watering stats were not enough to land it in the top spot for most watched season ever, because Squid Game pulled in an unfathomable 1.7 billion hours in its first 28 days, according to comicbook.com. 

Because Stranger Things season four was split into two - with the first batch of episodes landing in May, followed by the final two in July - its viewing figures were based on the first 28 days of volume one and the first 28 days of volume two.

Although it wasn’t able to steal the most-watched season crown from Squid Game, Stranger Things has proved to be a record-breaker for Netflix. 

It set an all-time streaming record back in July, with the show having 7.2 billion minutes of viewing time from between 30 May and 5 June, according to figures from Nielsen. 

The rankings, which were introduced two years ago, show that in the week prior – from 23 May to 29 May – Stranger Things had 5.14 billion minutes viewing, bringing the two-week total to 12.34 billion minutes.

The numbers are all the more impressive, because no show measured in Nielsen’s data has even managed to hit the six billion mark in a single week, let alone top seven billion.  

The previous highs were during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, when Tiger King and Ozark both managed to gain more than five billion minutes of viewing time. 

Although the Nielsen data counts any time spent watching any episode of a specific title, it’s believed that the huge Stranger Things numbers come from the drop of season four volume one. 

Fans had waited almost three years for the fourth season, and are keeping their fingers crossed that there won’t be quite as lengthy a wait for the fifth one.

And it seems as though they may be in luck, because yesterday the official Stranger Things writing team Twitter account revealed that day one in the writing room was underway.