Squid Game” Breaks Records with 4.9 Billion Minutes Watched in a Single Week

Squid Game Tops Viewership Records with 4.9 Billion Minutes Watched in One Week

In an impressive display of popularity, Squid Game claimed the title of the most-watched series in a single week for 2024, amassing an incredible 4.9 billion minutes of viewing time between December 23 and December 29, according to Nielsen’s report. This milestone comes as the show’s highly anticipated Season 2 premiered on December 26, drawing fans back into its deadly world. The viewership surge encompasses both the first season, which many revisited, and the newly released second season.

Season 2 of Squid Game alone accounted for more than 4 billion of those viewing minutes, with the numbers continuing to grow as the show rides a wave of success well into 2025. The remarkable figure was spread across 16 episodes in total—9 from Season 1 and 7 from Season 2. Notably, this record-breaking viewership dwarfed that of the second-most-watched title during the same week, which was Netflix’s Virgin River, at 2.2 billion minutes viewed over 64 episodes. Other notable titles that crossed the billion-minute threshold included Dwayne Johnson’s holiday film Red One, the thriller Carry-On, and children’s favorite Bluey, among others.

In addition to this viewership milestone, Squid Game’s Season 2 quickly rose through the ranks of Netflix’s most-watched seasons. It became the third most-watched season in Netflix history, behind only the first season of Squid Game (265 million views) and Wednesday (252 million views). By December 30, just four days after its release, Season 2 had already garnered a staggering 68 million total views, making it Netflix’s biggest TV debut to date. In the following week, the series amassed 126.2 million views, setting a new record for the streaming service, marking more views than any other Netflix series had managed in such a short span.

As Squid Game Season 2 continued to dominate, the first season also saw a resurgence, reappearing at No. 3 on the non-English TV top 10 list, proving the series’ enduring popularity and drawing even more attention to the high-stakes drama.