The Nielsen Streaming Charts For Ahsoka Week 4
And it’s time yet again to see how Ahsoka performed on Disney+. Nielsen added the 5th episode which included a lengthy flashback (kind of) to the Clone Wars era with a young Anakin Skywalker and his teenage padawan Ahsoka. Now the question is if this major guest appearance would boost the ratings. Click through to find out more!
The much better Ahsoka
And the answer is: no. Not at all, quite the opposite really. Ahsoka shed a few viewers compared to the previous episode, which is odd.
But let’s look at the numbers for week 4 of each show first!
Ahsoka: 577 million minutes / ep 5 length 49:52 = 11.57 million people
Obi-Wan Kenobi: 733 million minutes / ep 5 length 40:11 = 18.24 million people
Andor: 418 million minutes / ep 6 length 50:37 = 8.26 million people
The Book of Boba Fett: 580 million minutes / ep 4 length 47:05 = 12.32 million people
The Mandalorian S3: 795 million minutes / ep 4 length 30:39 = 25.94 million people
Ahsoka’s numbers this week are good enough for #4 on the original series charts.
But what we see here is that Ahsoka’s ratings did not get a boost from Hayden Christensen’s return, even though he had a substantial role in this episode in the quasi Clone Wars flashback (it was a vision in the World Between Worlds, but this is just semantics).
Last week Ahsoka had 11.89 million views, that means the Clone Wars flashback episode viewership is stagnating, and the ratings may have even declined for a bit, but this is very difficult to say because the metric used is anything but precise (however, it is becoming the de facto industry standard and Disney themselves use this metric to report “views” of their shows like Ahsoka or Loki season 2), we simply do not know how many people watched previous episodes that week and how much they contribute to the total viewership. Either way, at best viewership is stable.
Now let’s look at The Mandalorian season 3. It too had a Clone Wars flashback in its fourth week of release, we saw how Grogu was saved from the Jedi Temple by a Jedi played by Ahmed Best. This episode had the highest season 3 rating and saw a massive boost especially compared to the rather random Dr Pershing segue from the previous week, but it also outperformed the season 3 opening episode. In fact, it reached the heights of The Mandalorian season 2. Almost 26 million people tuned it. It is noteworthy that a much more substantial (and more meaningful) Clone Wars flashback featuring a prominent prequels cast member, and Hayden was the leading man even in that trilogy, did not boost Ahsoka’s ratings whatsoever. Meaning the more casual fans did not bother to tune in to at least see young Anakin in his prime again.
With these numbers Ahsoka only gets 44% of the audience The Mandalorian had. It is currently neck on neck with The Book of Boba Fett, Boba is slightly ahead of Ahsoka, has been all this time. But the 4th episode here was the final one that was about Boba Fett, and next week the ratings began to substantially improve when the series transformed into The Mandalorian season 2.5, gaining 2.5 million views, and the Luke Skywalker episode after that added another 2+ million and The Book of Boba Fett almost had 17 million views that week.
We can say with certainty now that Ahsoka is just doing “ok”, not even pulling in The Book of Boba Fett numbers, and even major guest star appearances don’t boost the numbers. The Book of Boba Fett, with similar numbers, still didn’t get the greenlight for a potential second season.
Now all of that would still be ok, the ratings are, in my opinion, solid, nothing to be proud of, but being a #10 original series streaming show is always good, even if the majority of your other Star Wars shows have better numbers. But as mentioned in the past few weeks things like The Book of Boba Fett or Andor, which is even by far the least watched Star Wars series, are not supposed to kickstart an eventual movie.
Now the movie will not just be about Ahsoka, it will be a crossover event that also features the Mandalorian and Grogu of course, and possibly other characters like Boba Fett, Bo-Katan and almost certainly at least CGI cameos by Luke and possibly Leia & Han, which could do wonders for the potential reach of the movie, let’s not forget that, but I am still not convinced it is a wise choice to release the Filoni Thrawn movie in theatres, which inevitably will come with a much higher budget and marketing costs. It all depends on where the focus lies, will the focus lie on Filoni’s Ahsoka, or will it be more on Din Djarin, or – though not too likely – will it even be on CGI Luke, Leia and maybe Han? If it is a galaxy wide crisis it would not make sense at all for them not to be involved in substantial roles. But that would mean Filoni has to give the spotlight to someone other than Ahsoka. And he is apparently very enamoured with her.
I feel this should still be a Disney+ event movie, somewhat higher budget probably, but within reason.
After five episodes we can say with certainty that Ahsoka on her own just doesn’t have the huge appeal people maybe thought she’d have. Also impacted of course by the writing on the show, Rosario Dawson’s bloodless performance (certainly mandated by Filoni) and the fact that the series never bothered to appeal to people who have not watched 200+ episodes of animated shows.
Samba TV released their numbers for the Ahsoka finale already. And if the Samba TV numbers are accurate it would not be good news. According to Samba TV Ahsoka lost about one third of its audience over the course of the series, 1.2 million Samba TV households watched the first episode over the course of six days. The finale only brought in a little more than 800 thousand households. We will wait for Nielsen to see if their numbers corroborate Samba’s numbers.
What else: the charts are, as always, dominated by Netflix, in a rare performance though Disney movies claim the #1 and #2 position on the movie charts, Elemental was added and it rose to #1, performing substantially better even than The Little Mermaid did in its first week of release, Elemental has 400 million more viewing minutes in its first week. The Little Mermaid meanwhile, as expected, is substantially shedding viewers after just one week, and I suppose next week it will either drop out of the charts or at best be on the level of evergreen Moana. Elemental had a very weak box office opening and overall it lost money at the box office, but later had very good legs and performed much better than expected, so it remains to be seen if the Pixar movie can repeat that performance on Disney+ or if it will shed viewers like The Little Mermaid in record time. At the box office The Little Mermaid narrowly beat Elemental (both movies lost a substantial amount of money because of highly inflated budgets and insane marketing costs for The Little Mermaid even), it seems on streaming it cannot compete with the Pixar movie. Elemental also performed much better outside the USA than The Little Mermaid, which is not surprising.
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