Now that Netflix has changed the way it measures viewership data and largely dropped the metric of how many households watched at least two minutes of a film and television title in favor of weekly rankings that count cumulative hours streamed, we’ve got a much better idea of what constitutes a success on the platform.
On the feature-length side of things, Red Notice officially became the most-watched original move in company history, and the first to rack up 300 million hours in total, which it managed to do in three weeks. By comparison, it took Sandra Bullock’s Bird Box 28 days to make it to 282 million.
While like-for-like comparisons are difficult when TV shows contain multiple episodes of varying lengths, that doesn’t make it any less astonishing that Squid Game saw Netflix subscribers invest over 1.6 billion hours of their time into the Korean phenomenon in the first four weeks it was streaming, as per FlixPatrol.
By comparison, French thriller Lupin Part 1 garnered 625 million, the fourth season of Money Heist drew in 619 million, and even Season 3 of Stranger Things could only get to 582 million. Squid Game‘s total is almost as much as those three put together, and when you break it down, audiences have spent over 68 million days bingeing the series.