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‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ tops streamed TV ratings
The Industry Mar 02, 2023
| Photo courtesy of Glenn Carstens-Peters/Unsplash
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By Steven Herbert
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” drew the third-largest weekly viewership ever for a streamed movie, one of five movies or series to top the 1 billion minutes for the week, according to figures released Thursday by Nielsen.
Viewers spent 2.269 billion minutes watching the Marvel Studios superhero film between Feb. 1-5, the first five days it was available on Disney+. Only “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” — 2.886 billion minutes the week of Dec. 26-Jan. 1 — and “Hocus Pocus 2” — 2.725 billion minutes the week of Sept. 26-Oct. 2, 2022 — had higher viewership among streamed movies.
Nielsen has released weekly streaming figures since January 2020.
“You People” was second with 1.55 billion minutes watched in its first full week of release, 1.6% less than the 1.55 billion minutes the previous week when the Netflix romantic comedy film was available for three days and finished first.
The NBC medical drama “New Amsterdam” was among the two other series or movies in the top 10 covering Jan. 30-Feb. 5 that were not in the previous week’s, finishing third with 1.253 billion viewing minutes of its 76 episodes streamed on Netflix and Peacock.
The other program in the latest 10 top not in the previous week’s was “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” fifth with 1.184 billion viewing minutes in the first full week the computer-animated comedy film was available on Netflix.
“The Last of Us” was the other program to top 1 billion minutes, placing fourth with 1.19 billion viewing minutes for the four episodes of the HBO/HBO Max post-apocalyptic drama. Viewership was up 35.7% from the 877 million minutes the previous week when three episodes were available and it finished sixth.
Dropping out of the top 10 were the Netflix comedy series “That ’90s Show”; the romantic action comedy film “Shotgun Wedding,” which streams on Prime Video, and the long-running CBS comedy “The Big Bang Theory,” which streams on HBO Max.
There were seven series or movies in the top 10 that stream exclusively on Netflix, along with “New Amsterdam,” which streams on both Netflix and Peacock; and one each that stream on Disney+ and HBO Max. Nielsen also announces streaming viewership of Apple TV+, Hulu and Prime Video programming.
The top 10 consisted of six acquired programs, three movies and one original streaming series, “Ginny & Georgia,” seventh for the week with 900 million viewing minutes of the 20 episodes of the series billed by Netflix as “a mix of mystery, intrigue and suspense, with modern, soapy, coming-of-age storytelling.”
Nielsen considers “The Last of Us” an acquired program because it also airs on HBO.
The top 10 programs were “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”; “You People”; “New Amsterdam”; “The Last of Us”; “Minions: The Rise of Gru”; “The Walking Dead”; “Ginny & Georgia”; “CoComelon”; “Grey’s Anatomy”; and “NCIS.”
The figures reflect only television set viewing, including such television-connected devices as Roku and Apple TV. Mobile-only viewing is not included in Nielsen’s streaming measurement systems.
While Nielsen releases weekly prime-time broadcast and cable ratings two days after the end of the week, except for holidays, viewership figures for streaming services are not released until 25 days after the end of the week because it takes more time to completely capture assets to report and aggregate streaming viewing, according to Nielsen.
Nielsen has announced it plans to shorten the release window for the viewership figures from streaming programming in the coming months.
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