LOKI Season 2 debuted 39% lower than Season 1 on Nielsen

‘LOKI’ Season 2 debuted 39% lower than Season 1, according to Nielsen..

Season two of the Marvel series premiered Oct. 5, and it gathered 446 million minutes of viewing time over its first three days and change (it was released at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT Oct. 5 in the United States), according to Nielsen’s streaming rankings. That’s about 39 percent lower than the 731 million minutes of viewing for Loki’s series premiere week in June 2021.

There are obviously multiple things potentially attributing to that drop, including the fact that the first season of Loki was one of the first MCU projects to be released after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. 2023 has also seen a couple of poorly reviewed projects from Marvel Studios, including Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the Secret Invasion series, which may have caused less interest in the overall franchise.

Disney said that the season two premiere, which runs 47 minutes, had 10.9 million “views” worldwide, which would equate to about 512 million minutes of watch time (the increasingly standard definition of a streaming view is total viewing time divided by run time). The 446 million minutes recorded by Nielsen includes viewing of season one’s six episodes as well, so it’s hard to say exactly how much time U.S. viewers spent watching just the season two opener — though it’s likely responsible for the majority of viewing time for the week.

The Disney+ premiere of Haunted Mansion racked up 992 million minutes of viewing for the week, continuing a strong recent run of movie debuts for the streamer after Elemental, The Little Mermaid and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Nielsen’s streaming ratings cover viewing on TV sets only and don’t include minutes watched on computers or mobile devices. The ratings only measure U.S. audiences, not those in other countries. The top streaming titles for Oct. 2-8 are below.

Overall

1. Suits (Netflix/Peacock), 1.28 billion minutes viewed

2. Grey’s Anatomy (Netflix), 1 billion

3. Haunted Mansion (Disney+), 992 million

4. Reptile (Netflix), 838 million

5. Love Is Blind (Netflix), 821 million

6. Bluey (Disney+), 701 million

7. NCIS (Netrflix/Paramount+), 666 million

8. Gilmore Girls (Netflix), 628 million

9. Elemental (Disney+), 621 million

10. Cocomelon (Netflix), 597 million

Loki Season 2 Final Episodes

Loki delivered a shocking twist at the end of the fourth episode of Season 2, essentially ending the TVA as we all knew it and sending fans into the great unknown for the last two episodes of the season. According to series composer Natalie Holt, those final two episodes are a sight to behold.

“I can’t wait for people to see Episode 6,” Holt told ComicBook.com in a recent interview. “And, for me, it was the most, just satisfying thing to write. Yeah, I just felt, I feel kind of like so emotionally tied up with the character. Because I’ve been working on th show for such a long time now. What it feels like. And, you know, what happens to Loki, I feel like I go on this journey with him every time I worked on a season. So, I just feel… Yeah, it was sort of sad to say goodbye and I didn’t want to stop working on it. Yeah, it feels… I can’t…. Yeah. All I can say is I can’t wait for people to see it.”