Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025
The wait is finally over. After a three-year hiatus, the Hawkins gang is back for their final bow, with Volume 1 of Stranger Things season 5 finally dropping on Netflix globally this past Thanksgiving Eve. With the split-release strategy in full effect and anticipation at an all-time high, the big question wasn’t if the show would be number one, but just how many records it would shatter. Now that the first batch of viewing figures is in, let’s dive into the data to see how the final season’s debut compares to season 4 and Netflix’s all-time heavyweights like Wednesday and Squid Game.
OK, what are the headline figures:
- Debuted #1 TV show for the period 11/24/25 – 11/30/25
- Hours Watched Globally: 284.2M
- Views: 59.6M views
So, yes, big numbers. According to Netflix, it boasts the biggest premiere week ever for an English-language show in the history of Netflix.
Are the big numbers a big surprise? Not really. This is easily the TV event of the year, if not in Netflix’s history. Between the global publicity tour, brand deals with anyone who would say yes, and the growing anticipation over the past three years, after production delays, it’s safe to say audiences have been well and truly primed for the new season.
Netflix’s press release for the first week viewership reads:
“Stranger Things fans everywhere set their dials to WSQK, The Squawk, tuning in to DJ Rockin’ Robin and the rest of the Hawkins crew as they continue their fight against Vecna for the fate of the world. The series returned last week with Volume 1 of its fifth and final season, touting the biggest premiere week ever for an English language show in the history of Netflix, amassing 59.6 million views and securing No. 1 on the English TV list. The new season made it into the Top 10 in all 93 countries tracked and reached No. 1 in 90 of them.
In reaction, the Duffer Brothers had this to say, “The sheer number of fans who have already watched Volume 1 is staggering — the response has been more than we ever could have dreamed. The show is now a decade old, and seeing the fanbase not only endure but continue to grow has been incredibly rewarding for us, the actors, and the thousands of artists who helped bring this story to life. We truly cannot thank everyone enough, and we are beyond excited to share Volume 2 — there’s so much more to come!”
The series as a whole dominated half of the Top 10 — another first for any English series. All five seasons of Stranger Things made the list, with the first season at No. 3 (8.9 million views), Season 4 at No. 5 (6.1 million views), Season 2 at No. 6 (5.6 million views), and Season 3 at No. 8 (4.6 million views). Having attracted worldwide admiration, the first four seasons have now accumulated 1.2 billion combined views since their premiere. The next three episodes of the series will be released on Christmas Day, and The Finale arrives on Netflix and in select theaters on New Year’s Eve, all at 5 p.m. PT.”
How Stranger Things Season 5 Compares To Other Launches
Another caveat we need to add when comparing it to other shows is that Stranger Things S5 had an unusual release time, opting for a primetime US release, so it didn’t drop at the traditional time of most other Netflix Originals. That means this isn’t quite a Wednesday release, and it’s certainly not a full Thursday release either.
Given that Stranger Things is a split season, that does complicate matters, given that we’ve only had half the overall runtime, and this will work in the show’s favor compared to shows that launched in full (like Wednesday season 1, for instance). So for clarity’s sake, here’s the same graph but using the pure hours metric over the views metric:
We haven’t included Stranger Things season 4 in the graphs, given that it launched on a Friday and therefore had significantly less time to pick up viewing hours and views. As a reminder, it opened up to 286.79M hours watched and 21.9M views.
Track all of Netflix’s top 10 data for Stranger Things here.
Stranger Things Tops Charts In All But Two Countries
Finally, we wanted to touch on the fact that while Stranger Things is a behemoth, it’s not quite the number 1 show on Netflix globally. As we’ve been tracking since launch via FlixPatrol, the show has been #1 in 91 countries out of the 93 they track, with two notable holdouts: South Korea and Japan.
In Japan, the series debuted second in the daily TV top 10s behind Scandal Eve. It topped the charts on Saturday but has since dropped to #2, where it now sits at #5.
South Korea is an even bigger holdout. It debuted at #6, rose to #5 for the next two days, and has sunk again to #6 and now #7. What’s been ahead of it? Taxi Driver, The Dream Life of Mr. Kim, Three Idiots in Kenya, Typhoon Family, 갱단과의 전쟁, and Dynamite Kiss.
Finally, looking at a few other metrics, you can see that on Google Trends, search interest almost levels off, almost rivaling season 4, with it currently tracking at 95.
Looking at TikTok’s data (which is a bit of a black box and hard to track) over the last 30 days, you can see the show is now peaking on the main #StrangerThings hashtag, with over 1 million posts. We’ll keep an eye on how this graph evolves in the weeks to come:
Picture Credit: Tiktok Ad Center
Samba TV has yet to release official data for the new season, but did write in a post that “Of all US households that watched the new season within the first five days, 39% binged all available episodes within the first 48 hours.”
And lastly, while on the subject of Stranger Things, we just wanted to point out how there’s been a steady increase in views for all prior seasons in the run-up to season 5, courtesy of the Netflix Engagement Reports.
After a notable viewership dip in late 2023, past seasons of Stranger Things staged a solid recovery since the first half of 2024, posting double-digit percentage growth in viewing hours across all four seasons. Season 1 and Season 3 were particularly strong, seeing increases of around 17% to 19%, which helped propel the first season up nearly 40 spots in the rankings. However, this initial momentum leveled off significantly during the second half of 2024, which served mostly as a stabilization period; Seasons 1 through 3 saw only marginal growth of roughly 2% to 3%, while Season 4 remained virtually flat, holding steady at 8.4 million views.
The trend shifted dramatically in the first half of 2025, which represents the most significant period of growth in the entire dataset. Viewership surged by roughly 23% to 30% for every season, driving numbers to their absolute highest points in the recorded timeframe—Season 4 alone reached a peak of 135.5 million hours viewed. This massive spike suggests a renewed wave of global interest, possibly driven by new viewers or a collective re-watch, pushing Season 1 into the top 100 rankings (Rank #78) and cementing early 2025 as the franchise’s peak performance window from available data.
How do you think Stranger Things did in its first week? Let us know in the comments down below.
