‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 Will Fall Short Of ‘Squid Game’ Netflix Record, For Now

It seemed like nothing would ever be able to catch Squid Game in terms of overall Netflix viewership, but Stranger Things season 4 is proving to be an even bigger monster than past seasons, and it’s going to get the closest.

The “competition” here is Stranger Things season 4 trying to reach the 28 day viewership of Squid Game, which was 1.6 billion hours viewed on the service. That 28 day window has now passed for Stranger Things, and despite being #1 for about three weeks and still hanging on at #2, it will fall well short with “just” 930.3 million hours viewed in the first 28 days.

But, there’s a catch. This is just part 1 of season 4, and part 2 debuts Friday of this week. Hours viewed for those two specific episodes, which total four hours as supersized entries, will be added to the 28 hour total. About 9 hours of the show has aired so far.

If you do the math, however, you can see that Stranger Things will still likely fall short of Squid Games’ grand total (views of part 1 after this will not count toward the initial 28 day total, which is now locked). If everyone who watched the first 9 hours of part 1 watch the second 4 hours, that would probably come in around 1.2-1.3 billion hours or so, still 3-400 million short of Squid Game.

However, this would still be deeply impressive, as before this point, nothing else was even a little bit close to Squid Game. Stranger Things also has what I would call a possible disadvantage, given that this is season 4 of the show, meaning potential viewers likely have three other seasons they would have had to have watched before this one. But Squid Game viewers were all just jumping into season 1. Though for megahits, it’s not unusual for viewership to actually grow over time, like we saw with Game of Thrones back when its audience continued to build year after year.

It’s possible Stranger Things season 4 could shoot for Squid Game’s overall 2.2 billion hours viewed record, and obviously the series as a whole has already surpassed that. But in terms of this 28 day time limited record, it’s going to be incredibly hard for Stranger Things to beat Squid Game without some sort of massive surge for the final two episodes. I wonder if fan campaigns may watch the last two on repeat to boost it, which could work, with enough repeat viewings. But it would have to be a lot.

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