Based on the massive numbers pulled in by a variety of movie and television titles across several platforms, the holiday season is the ideal time to release high profile original content exclusively to streaming.
Three major films and one TV show all dropped on Christmas Day to rank among the biggest hits of the year. Wonder Woman 1984 scored the largest streaming debut of any 2020 feature just ahead of Pixar’s Soul, which hit Disney Plus on the same day. Robert Rodriguez’s We Can Be Heroes, meanwhile, became the most-watched original family flick in Netflix’s history, while the Bridgerton juggernaut exploded onto the scene, and four weeks later it wound up as the company’s most-watched original series ever.
A week later, the hotly anticipated third season of Cobra Kai hit Netflix, and soon became one of the streamer’s most popular returning shows. In fact, the numbers have now been crunched for the first Monday to Sunday week of January, and the Karate Kid sequel series managed to comfortably outstrip Bridgerton in the Nielsen ratings from the 4th to the 10th.
Unsurprisingly, The Mandalorian is the only show in the Top 10 that doesn’t hail from Netflix, with Cobra Kai miles out in front. Season 3 was streamed for a massive 2.1 billion minutes, ahead of Bridgerton‘s 1.67 billion. Of course, in terms of overall viewership, the period drama’s 82 million is double the estimated 41 million who binged the third outing for Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso, but the latest batch of Nielsen ratings just goes to show how many households devoured the entirety of Bridgerton in the first week alone, if Cobra Kai was able to establish such a healthy lead in terms of minutes despite arriving only seven days later.
