Stranger Things season 4 was always going to be a huge event this summer, and it has not disappointed. In new figures revealed by Nielsen, following the massive debut of 5.14 billion minutes viewed during its premiere week on Netflix, the series smashed the single-week record between May 30 and June 5 pulling in an unprecedented 7.2 billion viewed minutes. To put this into context, no streaming series has ever managed to hit 6 billion viewed minutes in a week since Nielsen started putting out data two years ago, and the closest contenders have been the likes of Tiger King and Ozark, which both made it into 5 billion but nowhere near the level of Stranger Things.
The achievement of Stranger Things is made all the more impressive when considering other series released in the last two years have come during periods of lockdown while the Covid pandemic was in full flow. When more people were at home, looking for something to watch, it is hard to believe how easily Stranger Things has surpassed those numbers at a time when many people are now back to a more normal routine and shows how eager fans have been to see the latest installment in the saga of Hawkins and the Upside-Down.
As a comparison, other streamers didn’t manage to come close to the might of the Netflix monster. Obi-Wan Kenobi managed a decent 958 million minutes, which was close to matching its premiere week, while on Amazon Prime, The Boys managed similar numbers with 919 million viewing minutes. The one thing to remember in all of these cases, is that Nielsen’s numbers include all available episodes of the shows, and with Stranger Things having not only its three previous series, but seven bumper episodes of season 4 all dropping together, none of the other shows had a fair shot.
Stranger Things Has Now Released Its Final Episodes.
On July 1, the final two episodes of Stranger Things’ fourth season dropped, with a combined run time of almost four hours. Picking up where the seventh episode ended, the finale brought to a close the biggest and most ambitious season of the show ever. In fact, it was so ambitious that it not only took much longer to make, even taking into account Covid delays, but had the Duffer Brothers working up to literally the 11th hour to finalize the visual effects.
According to the minds behind Stranger Things, the last 20 visual effects shots of the finale were completed and uploaded to Netflix servers literally hours before the episodes were released, meaning that anyone watching as soon as the episodes arrived would possibly not see the completed version. Collider’s Steven Weintraub noted on his Twitter account, “If you watch the episode at 2am tonight you might not see the final shots. I believe they said 20 VFX shots. Which means you can watch [the] episode and probably not notice what wasn't 100% done. I don't want to make it sound like the episode wasn't 99% done."
With the Duffers promising that the final fifth season will not be as long in coming as this one, and the stakes set to be even higher, fans now can only wait to see how the Stranger Things story comes to an end.