One of the reasons why major streaming shows have started releasing episodes on a weekly basis instead of dropping them all at once on a more regular schedule is because the companies behind them want to keep the project in question at the forefront of the public consciousness for as long as possible, instead of dominating the headlines for a week or two and then fading into cultural obscurity.
It’s a problem that feature films are also going to have to get used to, with Wonder Woman 1984 a major case in point. After being released into theaters and HBO Max on Christmas Day, you couldn’t turn around for about a week or so without bumping into coverage of Patty Jenkins’ blockbuster sequel. However, it feels like a long time since anybody’s even mentioned the movie at all, despite the fact that it only debuted exactly five weeks ago.
That’s probably because everybody seems to have watched it in the space of three days, with Nielsen estimating that Wonder Woman 1984 was streamed for 2.3 billion minutes in the first week it was available on HBO Max. Bear in mind that Gal Gadot’s second solo outing as Diana Prince landed on a Friday, so these numbers were presumably accumulated over the course of a single weekend.
To put that into perspective, Wonder Woman 1984‘s viewership figure is streets ahead of the 1.7 billion minutes racked up by Disney Plus and Pixar’s Soul, not to mention the 1.4 billion spent by subscribers on Netflix’s smash hit Bridgerton in the same time frame, both of which were fellow December 25th streaming exclusives. Reviews may have been mixed and the box office appears to have fizzled out at less than $150 million globally, but the data makes it clear that a whole lot of people have seen the surprisingly divisive movie, which is exactly what Warner Bros. were hoping for.
