This must be the TV season of the witch. The past few months have offered lots of witchy goodness for Disney Plus subscribers — first, Star Wars show The Acolyte dabbled in the cosmic dark arts a little and then Marvel’s Agatha All Along came along to take us down the Witches Road with Kathryn Hahn and company. Unfortunately, history tells us witches aren’t always appreciated in their time.
The Acolyte was infamously cancelled by Disney after its first season concluded, killing an ambitious multi-year plan stone-dead, because it failed to make a strong enough impression in the ratings. You would think the only way for Agatha All Along to go after that was up, but the numbers suggest the MCU’s latest streaming series had an even less impressive opening than its Star Wars sister. Not to mention other recent Marvel series.
Agatha All Along premiere hexed 9.3 million viewers, but it’s still not as much as The Acolyte (or Loki season 2)
As per Deadline, Agatha All Along‘s two-part premiere lured in just shy of 10 million people, as Disney has confirmed it reached 9.3 million across its first 7 days on the streaming platform. That’s not too shabby, but it becomes a tad less magical when you compare it to certain other Disney Plus releases from over the past 12 months.
It’s not a simple task to rank Disney’s streaming shows via viewership as the studio is extremely selective about which data it shares, and even how it shares it. For instance, when The Acolyte came out this summer, we were told that its own opening episode had found its way into 11.1 million homes across its first five days. We don’t know the figures for its first full week, then, but clearly it already passed Agatha‘s seven-day total in much less time.
Comparing it to Echo, Marvel’s last live-action Disney Plus series that landed back in January, is even more difficult. All we know for sure is that it was watched for 731 million minutes across its first six days of availability — typically, Disney takes the total stream time and divides that by runtime to generate a more rounded figure. On the other hand, we can confidently say that Agatha is down on the Loki season 2 premiere. The second season of Tom Hiddleston’s popular series reached 10.9 million over just three days last November.
The good news is that Agatha All Along seems to have been officially classified as a miniseries, so it was always intended as a one-and-done and therefore isn’t at risk of cancellation. On the other hand, obviously a poor performance across the board would put the dampers on any further WandaVision spin-offs — like the upcoming Vision Quest, for example. Still, there’s no real reason to worry just yet. We’re only three episodes down at the time of writing. And, as the Ballad of the Witches Road promises, there may be glory at the end.