Amazon Prime Video
- Amazon Prime Video’s “The Boys” is the first non-Netflix series to debut on Nielsen’s weekly list of top streaming titles, showing that the series is a massive hit.
- It’s still lagging behind Netflix originals like “Cobra Kai” and “Lucifer,” though.
- Amazon announced last week that “The Boys” was getting a spinoff, saying that the season two premiere was the biggest global launch for an Amazon original series.
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Amazon announced last week that its gory superhero series, “The Boys,” was getting a spinoff and that its season two was its biggest global original series launch ever. Amazon said that these debut episodes grew its audience from season one by 89%.
New viewership data from Nielsen released on Thursday provided a snapshot of how popular the series is.
While the data was limited to US viewership, “The Boys” is still the first TV series outside Netflix to crack Nielsen’s weekly list of most-watched streaming movies and TV shows. The list includes content from Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu, and measures minutes watched over the course of a week (this week’s list measured August 31 to September 6).
“The Boys” landed on this week’s list at No. 3 with 891 million minutes watched. It still lagged behind Netflix originals “Cobra Kai” (2.17 billion minutes) and “Lucifer” (1.41 billion minutes). But since more episodes of “The Boys” season two have debuted since this week’s timeframe, the show could inch closer to the top in the coming weeks.
"The Boys" season two, which debuted September 4, is a hit with critics just as much as audiences. It has a 96% Rotten Tomatoes critic score compared to season one's 84%. NPR called it a "wonderfully subversive, cynically entertaining piece of work."
A third season has already been greenlit. The spinoff will focus on a college for young superheroes run by Vought corporation that controls the "supes," according to Amazon.
"The Boys" is just one example of Amazon's efforts to boost its sci-fi and fantasy content. Data from research firm Ampere Analysis, provided to Business Insider in February, showed that the percentage of Amazon's TV commissions that are sci-fi doubled from the second half of 2018 through 2019, from around 15% to around 30%.