There’ve been a lot of conspiracy theories flying around the internet that say Warner Bros. and HBO Max have been actively trying to downplay the success of Zack Snyder’s Justice League by not revealing any official viewership numbers. While that’s technically true and we don’t know for sure how many subscribers have watched the movie, it also applies to the majority of high profile streaming exclusives.
Warner Bros. touted Wonder Woman 1984 as the biggest digital premiere of 2020 and later announced Godzilla vs. Kong as the most-watched debut in HBO Max history, not to mention Amazon celebrating the success of Coming 2 America as having the largest opening weekend for a streaming exclusive during the COVID-19 era in terms of audience size, but in all three cases there was never any data presented to back it up.
The majority of the information so far has come from analytics gathered by Samba TV, but even then the figures only apply to televisions that have the company’s third-party app installed. However, Samba have nonetheless offered that the Snyder Cut managed to double its viewership during the first 39 days it was available on HBO Max since a 1.8 million debut weekend, taking it up to a total of 3.7 million.
Admittedly, that’s less than the 3.8 million who reportedly tuned into Mortal Kombat in its first three days, but as always, it’s far from a definitive picture or certifiable metric of success. As of last month, AT&T said there were 44.2 million paying customers signed up to HBO Max, but we’ve got no idea how many of them either have access to Samba TV or installed the software, so we’ll never know for sure how popular Justice League has been until the company reveals concrete information.
Published: May 2, 2021 08:51 am