Andor Gets Huge Ratings Boost With Finale

Nielsen have updated their streaming charts and finally added episode 12 of Andor, which was the last episode of season 1. And it seems the strategy to air the first two Andor episodes on network tv paid off, since Andor’s viewing minutes got a huge boost compared to previous episodes! Click through for more!

According to Nielsen Andor’s final season 1 episode accumulated 674 million minutes! This is actually the highest figure for Andor yet, even the three part pilot arc, which was dropped all at once, didn’t get these numbers, the pilot arc consisting of three episodes only had 624 million minutes. Now with that Andor still has the least watched finale of any other previous Star Wars live action series, approximately 30% less, but Andor is also the first Star Wars live action series to get a 50% boost with its season finale!

With these numbers Andor is the most popular series on Disney+, even outperforming Bluey (a very popular series for young preschool kids).

I am speculating here but in my opinion the huge boost has probably two or three reasons.

• Disney made the first two Andor episodes available to the public who don’t have Disney+, by airing it on network tv, thus giving people not subscribed to Disney+ a chance to check out the series for themselves. This could mean that quite a few people actually liked what they saw and decided to check out the full series on Disney+
• people may have held back on viewing the series when it became very obvious that Andor is made for binge watching and thus waited for the finale to drop so they can watch it all in 2 or 3 days
• the very positive word of mouth by the people who love the series may have convinced people who usually don’t watch Star Wars on Disney+ to finally give the series a chance

To provide a comparison, The Book of Boba Fett had 885 million minutes with its finale, Obi-Wan Kenobi 860 million minutes. So Andor cannot keep up with the other two shows. However, different episode lengths and different number of episodes make these numbers not easily comparable, viewing minutes are not the same as traditional network tv ratings where you get actual viewership numbers, something that is apparently very difficult to gauge for external analysts like Nielsen.

So Andor ends on a high note. In my opinion 672 million minutes for the finale, for a series that is very, very different from the usual Star Wars formula, can be considered a success for Lucasfilm. But of course only they know if the series performed according to expectations or not. And as mentioned previously various metrics determine the success of a streaming series, most important is the number of new subscribers that can be attributed to a series. And we know nothing about that. However, given that Andor was aired on network tv and that ratings increased by 50% chances are high that quite a few people might have signed up for Disney+ to watch the entire series.

And that’s it for Andor. Season 2 is filming, but there is no release date yet. Next up is The Bad Batch in January, and then The Mandalorian in March. With Ahsoka and The Acolyte following later in 2023.

It’s unclear if The Bad Batch will make it into the charts at all (only the pilot managed to enter the top 10), but it will be interesting to see how season 3 of The Mandalorian will perform. But we will have to wait until early April 2023 for first numbers.

The most successful original series overall is Wednesday on Netflix, no contest, the series has almost 6 billion minutes streamed. More than four times as much as the series in second place.

And with that I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

The Nielsen Streaming Charts

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• Disclosure Policy