It should come as no surprise that Squid Game dominated streaming following the Season 2 debut, but Nielsen‘s latest streaming report reveals that it actually set a record for a single week of viewership last year.
From December 23 to 29, Squid Game amassed a whopping 4.9B minutes viewed. Season 2 became available on December 26, so this interval only includes four days of viewing for it. However, Nielsen doesn’t separate viewership by season, so this would also include any viewing time that Season 1 collected that week as well.
For context, though, the series was nowhere to be found on the Nielsen charts even one week prior to Season 2’s debut. Also worth noting, Nielsen only reports U.S. viewership, meaning that the global audience was likely much bigger.
This is also far bigger than Season 1’s debut week, when the series collected about 3B minuted viewed (which is already an impressive feat). As Deadline previously reported, Squid Game Season 2 cracked Netflix‘s non-English most popular series list in just three days.
Overall, as expected, it was a big week for streaming due to both the holidays as well as an influx of new content. There were eight titles that crossed the billion-minute threshold during this interval.
Virgin River came in second place with 2.2B minutes viewed, while Red One — which performed really well on Prime Video, considering its lackluster performance at the box office — was in third place with 1.8B minutes viewed.
Netflix’s airport thriller Carry-On continued to pull its weight with another 1.5B minutes viewed in fifth place, and Tyler Perry’s most-watched Netflix film Six Triple Eight climbed to even greater heights with another 1.3B minutes.
Bluey, of course, made an appearance at No. 6, and Landman and The Equalizer rounded out the billion-minute titles.
Naturally, audiences were feeling the holiday spirit, opting to watch some Christmas classics this week as well. Home Alone and Elf got the final two Top 10 spots, each with around 900M minutes viewed.
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