Stranger Things 4the most recent season of the hit show, just became the second Netflix show ever over a billion hours watched† Since the first episode of the season aired on May 27, viewers have spent a total of 1.15 billion hours watching the season’s nine episodes, including 301 million hours last weekend. That makes Stranger Things 4 the second most-watched Netflix season ever, after squid game in 2021. It was in Netflix’s Top 10 in 93 different countries this weekend, the company says. The show is now so popular that it’s also boosting the older seasons: all four Weird stuff seasons were in the six most-watched series of Netflix this weekend, with only The Umbrella Academy able to keep up.
Netflix’s viewer measurement system is notoriously weird and confusing. The service tracks how much a show is watched in the first 28 days of its release, but those numbers vary widely based on how the episodes are released, how long they are, and a bunch of other factors.
If anything, you could argue that Weird stuff‘success only underlines how great’ squid game was real: Stranger Things 4 is hours longer than squid game and had a marketing strategy of months behind it, and squid game still trumped it with 1.65 billion watched hours. Weird stuff could still catch it though; Netflix’s numbers no longer count the first batch of episodes, but the most recent two still have a few weeks to pick up viewing hours. Those episodes are also long — like a full-length movie long — which gives the show an even better picture in the first place. (Like I said, the measurement is confusing.)
So you shouldn’t read too much into the details, except to say with great confidence that the current season of Weird stuff is very popular. It’s also very good, and sets the stage for a huge slot next season. And it’s the kind of enduring franchise that Netflix has been desperately building in recent years, so you can expect the company to continue to pull out all the stops to get people interested in what’s happening in Hawkins, Indiana.
So you can only assume that Stranger Things 5 becomes huge.
