Forget ‘Rings of Power’, Amazon’s highest achieving show of last year was ‘The Boys’

Despite a $1 billion production spend, its safe to say that the once hotly-anticipated return to Middle Earth in the Rings of Power didn’t quite stick the landing with fans of J.R.R Tolkein’s work and Peter Jackson’s films.

Some decidedly damning evidence of this may well be the fact that it wasn’t the most-viewed show on the Amazon Prime Video platform in 2022. That honor went to the mature-audience superhero hit, The Boys, according to ranking data from Nielsen detailing 2022’s Top Streaming Programs.

Of course, while 9.4 billion minutes viewed for The Rings of Power is nothing to scoff at and can by all means likely be considered a success. However, we shouldconsider that the initial spend per episode for The Boys in season one was around the $11 million mark (via BuzzFeed). This adds up to roughly $88 million for season one. 

Presuming the show was allocated a few million more per episode for each successive season as the show continued gaining traction, it’d likely still fall shy of, or around $500 million in total for all three seasons of The Boys. Not too shabby a feat to beat out a show which was allocated $1 billion for a single season. 

Outside of Amazon shows, Netflix remained the most-viewed and dominant of the streamers, with Stranger Things, Ozark, and Wednesday securing the top three spots in Nielsen’s rankings.

The Boys season four started filming back in August last year. We’re probably going to wait until the back half of this year at a minimum, seeing as we don’t have any inkling of a release date just yet.