Over the weekend, Netflix subscribers were glued to their screens watching the first part of Stranger Things' fourth season. Viewers shattered the record previously held by Shonda Rhimes' Bridgerton for most hours spent watching a series during its premiere weekend.
Stranger Things racked up 286.79 million hours of screen time globally from its release on Friday to Sunday. The streaming giant's assessment shows that it performed close to 50% better than the previous record holder season two of Bridgerton. In March, Bridgerton fans tuned into the opening weekend of season two, racking up over 193 million hours of viewership. At the end of its first month, Bridgerton would be viewed for an additional 463.26 million hours, creating a new record for the English series with the most hours viewed.
Part of the fourth chapter of Stranger Things premiere weekend success is due to the show's encapsulating story-telling. Even celebrities have weighed in on the season's drama. For example, FINNEAS, Academy Award, Grammy, and Golden Globe winner and brotherly producer to the music industry darling Billie Eilish, showed his support for the series, tweeting, "New season of stranger things 🤯."
Also, Kate Bush's song "Running Up That Hill", originally released in 1985, has also enjoyed a recent resurgence success in the last week since being used in the new season of Netflix's sci-fi series. Since being featured, the younger audience of Stranger Things ears' streamed the song so often, it captured No. 1 on Apple's iTunes and was the second most listened to song on Spotify's U.S. chart.
The release of the fourth part of the series also pushed previous seasons into the top ten watched series. Stranger Things seasons one, two, three, and four took four of the top five spots, with The Lincoln Lawyer: Season 1 taking the second spot with 64.82 million streams, still a whopping 221.97 million hours less than the top most-viewed series.
The opening weekend for Stranger Things not only breaks Bridgerton season two's opening weekend record for most views, but puts it on track to break the period piece's record for most viewed English-speaking series of all time. Fans of the sci-fi drama will have to wait until July to view the second part of the series: two episodes that total almost four hours. It may be hard, though, to beat the most-streamed Netflix series of any language, which Squid Game currently holds having been watched for a total of 1.65 billion times in its first month.