Officially now the second most popular show in Netflix’s history, Stranger Things’ fourth season hit 1.15 billion hours viewed in the first 28 days after being launched. The only other show that surpassed that in the same amount of time is Squid Game, with the massive international hit seeing about 1.65 billion hours of viewing in the same time period.
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Of course, the two parts of the season were released weeks apart. The first seven episodes had a viewing time of 930 million hours within 28 days of the show’s debut. Meanwhile, episodes 8 and 9 reached 221 million hours viewed in the week of June 27th to July 3rd. It could still overtake the Korean hit in total hours watched, as it seems like Squid Game had a much more viral start and quicker drop-off than Stranger Things.
Stranger Things has proved to be a major boon for Netflix since the first season was released in 2016. The company saw their first decrease in subscribers in Q1 2022, losing about 200,000 subscribers during that period. However, it is thought that Stranger Things 4 has given the company massive growth again (we aren’t sure what the numbers will look like until Netflix’s investor meeting). It may be only for the couple of months that the show was being released, but that remains to be seen.
We also know there will be a fifth and final season of the show. Before the third season was released Netflix had announced that it would be the last, but it realised quickly that the show has a lot more left in it and can return a lot in subscriber numbers. It will be interesting to see if the fifth season is in fact the final one, but it has been very clear that the production costs are so high it might not be worth keeping the show going.