Wonder Woman 1984 Conquered The Holiday Streaming Charts For HBO Max
With superheroes nowhere to be seen for such a long time, Wonder Woman 1984 was always bound to take the spotlight on Christmas day. Of course, that wasn’t the only film from an up-and-coming streaming platform to debut during the holidays, as Disney Plus also premiered Pixar’s Soul that same day.
For now, the media gurus over at Nielsen do not publish data related to HBO Max. Instead, their streaming numbers and viewing times are collected from a basket of Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu. For that reason, Soul easily climbed atop the charts for the tail end of 2020 after it became available on Disney Plus, among usual suspects like The Office, The Mandalorian and newcomer Bridgerton, while Wonder Woman 1984 remained on the sidelines with a huge question mark placed next to it.
However, an update from Nielsen itself just confirmed Wonder Woman 1984 did indeed surpass the numbers put up by Soul during the holidays, with people tuning in to watch Diana Prince save the world for a whopping 2.3 billion minutes total, which translates to about 35% more watch time than what Soul managed during that same time frame. One small caveat to keep in mind is that the announcement does not dive too deep towards explaining how these numbers are affected by Wonder Woman’s extra 50 minutes of runtime when compared to Soul.
This study does not mean that Nielsen will suddenly start reporting regularly on HBO Max data anytime soon, as the company disclosed that for now it was a one-time direct collaboration with WarnerMedia in order to measure viewership and it is currently working on ways to source the necessary data to fully add HBO Max to its weekly rankings.
Though WarnerMedia likely has their proprietary tools to measure viewership, it is likely in their best interests for this information to become public to assert the notion that Warner’s HBO Max play is indeed working as planned. Wonder Woman 1984 was a major boost in subscription numbers for HBO Max, with parent company AT&T disclosing the service had jumped to 17.2 million users by the fourth quarter of 2020, a small number when compared to Disney Plus’ over 70 million users, but one that does make Wonder Woman 1984 viewership even more impressive.
Wonder Woman’s performance at the box office remains underwhelming and stands as further proof that big-budget films cannot expect to recoup their investment, let alone turn profits, only from a worldwide theatrical release during the pandemic. Nevertheless, if HBO Max can grow its user base beyond that, then perhaps there is more potential in dual same-day releases than cinema turnout might suggest in the first place.
Source: Variety
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