Stranger Things 5 Breaks Netflix Viewership Records on New Year’s Day as It Joins the Most Popular List, Plus The Great Flood Shines in Non-English Films
The two-hour finale of Stranger Things, released on New Year’s Eve, propelled Netflix to its highest number of views on New Year’s Day to date. While the streaming platform did not disclose specific view counts, it revealed that the fifth season of the supernatural series accumulated 31.5 million views during the week of December 29, which comprised four full days of viewing for the finale, along with seven days for Episodes 1-7.
Considering all episodes, Stranger Things 5 now ranks on Netflix’s Most Popular English TV list, officially entering the Top 10 at No. 9 with a total of 105.7 million views.
How Netflix derived these figures is intricate. The company employs a sophisticated methodology for calculating views across split seasons. Each batch of episodes is measured over a 91-day release period, with Vol. 1 views ceasing to count after February 24, Vol. 2 after March 25, and the finale views past March 31.
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The complexity increases as Netflix calculates reported weekly views based on the number of episodes available within specific timeframes: four episodes from November 26 to December 24, seven from December 25 to the evening of December 31, and eight thereafter.
The calculation for the most popular list requires the total viewing for a season to be divided by its full runtime. Due to the complicated split season methodology, it is difficult to independently verify the views Netflix attributes to Stranger Things 5.
Currently, Stranger Things 4, another split-season entry, holds the No. 3 position on the list.
A basic estimation based on publicly available viewership information suggests that for the first four weeks—including Stranger Things 5—the average view count may inflate to approximately 119 million views to date. Additionally, over 1.1 million fans watched the series finale in theaters between December 31 and January 1.
In other English TV Top 10 news, the latest limited mystery series from Harlan Coben, Run Away, debuted at No. 2 with 12.7 million views. Emily in Paris Season 5 ranked No. 4 with 7.4 million views, coinciding with the comedy’s renewal for a sixth season. Ricky Gervais’s new special, Mortality, also made its debut at No. 6 with 5.1 million views.
On the film front, the Korean disaster movie The Great Flood again topped the non-English film list with 11.1 million views, and it entered the Most Popular non-English film list at No. 7 after three weeks of release, amassing 72.1 million views.
