The latest project from Lucasfilm Animation, Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord, has been highly praised since its debut earlier this month. Now we have the first viewership figures.
In an article on StarWars.com, Lucasfilm announced that the show’s premiere episode received 4.1 million views worldwide after 7 days of streaming on Disney+. They did not reveal numbers for the second episode that was released at the same time. This is also not the full story as we’ll get into below.
Looking Closer
It is worth pointing out views does not represent unique viewers. Disney and other streaming service use a different method of calculating views. A view in Disney and other streaming service’s eyes is the total runtime spent watching a series or movie divided by its running time. Deadline explained this previously.
The method used in this case assumes that every time a person watches a new series or film that person would complete the viewing each time. This in turn inflates the unique view number. However, it is likely that some users are watching multiple times and others will never even make it to the end of the episode or movie the first time.
For data that can be compared to other Star Wars shows, we will have to wait until charts from Nielsen are released. Nielsen’s data tracking runs four weeks behind meaning we won’t find out for a few more weeks. That said, not all Star Wars animated shows have done well enough to make its way into Nielsen’s charts. The Bad Batch Season 1 opened to 251 million minutes with two episodes and one of them being quite long. Given Shadow Lord episode 1 is much shorter, it appears that the new show opened well.
For comparison, The Acolyte opened with 11.1 million after 5 days. Using the formula as mentioned above, it was actually 6.4m. Ahsoka also opened to have 14m in 5 days but the reality is it was around 8m.
Showing Up Ahead Of Season 2
In the same blog post, Lucasfilm confirmed Shadow Lord remains the #1 trending series on Disney+ in the United States of America. It also continues to rank as one of the top 10 titles on Disney+ a week after it has premiered.
The company’s Co-President and Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni released a statement on Maul Shadow Lord. He said that “I’m very proud of our team as they continue to challenge themselves and raise the bar on our animated shows. They’ve done a fantastic job delivering something new and exciting with this series and we are all really happy that fans are enjoying it.” The show has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics and almost as high reviews from fans.
There are still a three weeks worth of episodes to go culminating with a finale at 12am local time on May the 4th, Star Wars Day. Lucasfilm announced at the start of this month that Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord will be getting a second season. This is was quite the shock to fans given the first season had not even begun airing yet.
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