All eyes are on Stranger Things–well, at least, one billion pair of them.
Stranger Things is known for throwing plot twists at its audience. Now, with a record-breaking number of views, it’s throwing twists into Netflix history.
The show broke the billion-hour barrier July 5 at exactly 1.15 billion hours. Collider reports that the first volume alone reached 930 million views, with the final two episodes adding 220 million hours to the total. This record surpassed almost every other Netflix series for viewing time, with Squid Game staying in the lead.
Since the realm of billion-hours-viewed is already harder to get into than the Upside Down, it’s an even bigger accomplishment that all this happened in record time. It took only 28 days for the bulk of Season 4 to reach its millions of hours. And the views for the last two episodes? It only took a week.
Compare this to Tiger King, the previous record holder at 5.3 billion streaming minutes, according to Deadline. And that was during quarantine, when people had no choice but to stay home and watch TV. Stranger Things didn’t need a forced audience to pass that goal.
With all these accomplishments, could Stranger Things catch up with its rival, Squid Game? At 1.65 billion views, Squid Game has quite a head start. Forbes reports that Stranger Things has until the end of July “to get exactly 500 million more viewing hours to catch Squid Game’s total”.
And it’s possible. With Squid Game’s season being so much shorter than Stranger Things at 8.2 hours versus 13 hours, Stranger Things has a shot.
Series creators Matt and Ross Duffer are already planning their writers’ room to be open for business next month as they start planning for the show’s fifth and final season. The brothers said they have already outlined all of Season 5, explaining that they had looked at the fourth and fifth seasons “as a whole.”
Keep reading Horror News Network for the latest on Season 5 of Stranger Things on Netflix.
