‘Stranger Things’ Shatters Netflix Record

Stranger Things has broken yet another record at Netflix.

The series’ fifth and final season premiere over Thanksgiving shattered viewing records at the streamer, according to Nielsen’s latest weekly report, racking up a massive 8.46 billion viewing minutes in just the first week.

While Nielsen doesn’t separate the viewing minute totals by season, it did indicate that 57% of that number came from the newly-released Season 5 episodes.

Deadline reports that the number is officially the highest weekly viewing total ever produced by a streaming title by well over 1 billion minutes, breaking a record of 7.2 billion minutes previously also held by Stranger Things following the Season 4 premiere in 2022.

Earlier this month, Stranger Things broke yet another viewership record at Netflix, accumulating 59.6 million views worldwide within the first week of its premiere to claim the title of best premiere-week viewership ever for an English-language Netflix series.

That record was previously held by the first season of Wednesday, which brought in 56 million views in its first four days. The all-time premiere-week viewership record is still held by Squid Game Season 2, however, as it achieved 68 million views in the same timespan.

With such a record-breaking run for Season 5, Stranger Things is seemingly setting up for a massive showing as Vol. 2 of Season 5 prepares to drop on Thursday, with the series finale set to premiere on New Year’s Eve.

Monday, co-creator Ross Duffer revealed the final runtimes for the rest of the final season of Stranger Things, revealing that the three episodes that make up Vol. 2 will run for about three and a half hours in total ahead of the supersized finale.

• Episode 5 “Shock Jock”: 1hr 8min
• Episode 6 “Escape From Camazotz”: 1hr 15min
• Episode 7 “The Bridge”: 1hr 6min

Stranger Things: The Finale — The Rightside Up is then set to run for two hours and eight minutes when it premieres simultaneously on Netflix and in 500 movie theaters across the U.S.