Stranger Things Season 5 is just days away from returning in the 2025 TV schedule with three of the final four episodes. There was little doubt when Volume 1 released right before Thanksgiving that it would easily top Netflix's Top 10, but didn't stay at #1 for very long. Now, the numbers are in for all the people who tuned in to Volume 1 ASAP with their Netflix subscription in November, and the staggering totals may explain a lot.
Stranger Things' New Record For Netflix
Prepare yourself for some numbers that may seem Upside Down! According to Nielsen's most recently weekly report (via Deadline), Stranger Things recorded 8.46 billion viewing minutes in the week of November 24 - November 30. No, that's not a typo – billion.
Unsurprisingly, the 8.46 billion minutes translates to Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1 setting a brand new record with the biggest weekly viewing total ever produced by a streaming title, and it's not even close. It beat the previous record by more than 1 billion minutes.
The record that it beat? Stranger Things Season 4, with 7.2 billion minutes upon premiere in 2022. Per the Nielsen numbers, Stranger Things' runner up during premiere week was Paramount+'s Landman, with just 1.34 billion minutes.
Of course, Stranger Things was already back on Netflix's Top 10 that week before the premiere on November 26. Nielsen's latest numbers report that 57% of the 8.46 billion minutes came from Volume 1 of Season 5, and 59% were in the valuable 18-49 age demographic.
There's not really any question of whether Stranger Things will shoot back up to the #1 spot on Netflix's Top 10 with the release of Stranger Things' next volume on Christmas Day, and I'd be surprised if it dropped any lower ahead of the series finale on New Year's Eve. Still, those initial numbers support a theory that I came up with shortly after the arrival of those first four episodes.
Why Did Stranger Things Get Knocked Down In The Top 10 So Quickly?
As you may recall, Stranger Things was dethroned from the #1 spot on Netflix's Top 10 just over a week after its pre-Thanksgiving release, with Sean Combs: The Reckoning bumping Volume 1 down to #2. At the time, news had already broken that the first volume had achieved a wild 59.6 million views, marking the best premiere-week viewership in the history of Netflix's English language series.
At that point, my theory was that so many people binged their way through the four episodes of Volume 1 that the drop from #1 just days after the release was because everybody had already watched. It seemed most likely to me that Sean Combs: The Reckoning didn't have the same drawing power as the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, so I'm just going to go with my initial theory that the huge early numbers followed by the drop are due to widespread early binge-watching.
With the premiere of Volume 2 just three days away at the time of writing, Stranger Things still has a high place in Netflix's Top 10 TV Shows in the U.S. Dave Chappelle: The Unstoppable is at #1, followed by Emily in Paris at #2, Stranger Things at #3, Sean Combs: The Reckoning #4, and Man vs. Baby at #5. (Let it not be said that Netflix's Top 10 is limited to one genre!)
Volume 2 of Stranger Things Season 5 will premiere with three new episodes on Christmas Day at 8 p.m. ET. Be sure to tune in ASAP if you want to contribute to a possible new record... and if you want to be all caught up in time for the series finale on New Year's Eve.
