‘Thor 4’ And ‘Cobra Kai’ Tower Over ‘Rings Of Power’ And ‘House Of The Dragon’

The Nielsen ratings for the week of September 5, 2022 through September 11, 2022 turned out to be a scorcher. Five different shows or movies from four platforms cracked the one billion-minutes viewed mark, including two debuts above 1.5 billion minutes. With three episodes for AmazonAMZN
and four for HBO Max, House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power are more closely aligned this week. The Lord of the Rings prequel notched 1.203 billion minutes (-4% from last week’s 1.253 billion-minute frame), and the Game of Thrones prequel earned 1.016 billion minutes (+30% from last week’s 781 million minutes). Regardless of which show is ‘winning,’ this seems to further argue for what I discussed last week.

Both shows are released every week. Both are considered appointment television. We may not see sky-high cumulative numbers since most consumers only watch the most recent over/under 65-minute episode. They are both huge hits now, but the real question is whether audiences are still tuning in for seasons three and four. If House of the Dragon seems to be more searched and discoursed so far, I will wager that’s partially because it’s aimed at older audiences and more likely to inspire fan theories and the “I can’t believe that happened!” plot turns. Amusingly, neither show came near the 1.737 billion-minute debut of Cobra Kai (all ten episodes of season five plus the preceding four years of the Karate Kid sequel).

That show is a YouTube Red original that became a Netflix sensation between seasons two and three. It’s one of those shows, like Lucifer, You and Schitt’s Creek, that had to fail elsewhere before Netflix turned it into a hit. We’ll see if the upcoming season of Manifest does likewise. Like Stranger Things, Cobra Kai has the advantage of playing to nostalgic adults while also being 104% appropriate for (most) kids. Speaking of four quadrants, Thor: Love and Thunder debuted with a thunderous 1.5 billion minutes, translating to around 12.5 million viewings of the 126-minute Chris Hemsworth/Natalie Portman MCU sequel. The film’s $343 million domestic and $760 million (sans China, natch) global gross certainly did not hurt its Disney+ streaming potential.

Robert Zemeckis’ critically trashed Pinocchio pulled 930 million minutes, around 8.9 million viewings. That does show that streaming-only movies can draw upper-level (if not top-tier) streaming viewership. Albeit Pinocchio and the likes of Hocus Pocus 2 and Disenchanted A) probably would have gone to theaters in pre-Covid times and B) are only a big deal because of previous theatrical success. Sony’s Morbius arrived on Netflix and lodged 610 million viewers. That’s around 5.8 million viewings of the Jared Leto Marvel movie. That’s aggressively okay but again shows that the folks pretending to rediscover and embrace Morbius post-theatrical were not remotely representative of the general population. Elvis nabbed another 400 million minutes on HBO Max, down 17% from its 482 million-minute debut.

The two big fantasy shows are essentially tied. However, plenty of folks watch House of the Dragon on HBO (and not HBO Max) and the differing episode drop schedule (one on Thursday night and the other on Sunday night) complicates comparisons. Taika Waititi’s Thor 4 posted the year’s second-biggest feature debut, behind the 1.7 billion-minute launch of Pixar’s ‘was supposed to be in theaters’ Turning Red. We’ll see how much higher Hocus Pocus 2 stacks up in a few weeks. Pinocchio pulled a likely best-case-scenario (sans theaters) debut, but we’ll see how long it sticks around (Lightyear here and gone). She-Hulk continues to pull consistent numbers (493 million minutes with four episodes). Audiences are watching it one over/under 35-minute episode at a time.