Nielsen’s Numbers For Bird Box Back Up Netflix’s Claims Of Success

As we previously reported, Netflix claimed that the apocalyptic horror film Bird Box was a massive hit for the streaming service, bringing in 45 million views. According to The Hollywood Reporter, while Nielsen’s numbers are significantly lower, it still backs up Netflix’s claims of success.

The new Nielsen SVOD Content Ratings put the film at 26 million views, making it second among Netflix originals. It’s only behind Stranger Things season two, and even only by less than a million viewers. Netflix claimed that the film had the best seven-day numbers for one of their films ever, with over a third of their subscribers watching it in the first week. They later said that accounts had to watch at least 70% of the movie to count, but didn’t say how many of their 45 million did so.

Nielsen’s measure of “U.S. Persons 2+ Unduplicated Reach” says that in the first day, it had 3.5 million viewers. This did not beat Will Smith’s Bright, which had 5.4 million on its first day a year prior in 2017. However, Bird Box didn’t drop off like Bright did, as that film ended up with 20 million after a week. During its first ten days, Bird Box was averaging almost 4 million viewers a day. The single highest day of viewing was December 28 (eighth day of release), with the average audience at nearly 3.9 million US viewers. Nielsen said this is “a very atypical event and likely attributable to the extraordinary buzz around the movie.”

If you want some more individual statistics, Nielsen gave those too. Over half of the audience was female at 57% compared to males 43%. 36% of the viewers were between the ages of 18 and 34, which was the highest amount. 46% percent of the audience was either African American or Hispanic, the highest concentration of that number of all Netflix originals. 22% were Hispanic while 24% were African-American.