‘WandaVision’ was even bigger than ‘Bridgerton’ in January

• Bridgerton is Netflix’s most-watched original TV series so far, with some 82 million households having watched the show in the first 28 days since its Christmas weekend launch.
• A brand new show was the most-watched TV series in January, despite being launched only in the second half of the month.
• Only three episodes of WandaVision aired on Disney+ in January, but that was enough for Marvel’s show to beat Bridgerton’s audience for the month.

Shondaland’s Bridgerton launched last Christmas on Netflix became the streaming service’s biggest original series to date. Some 82 million households streamed the adventures of the Bridgertons in the first 28 days after launch. The TV show topped the charts in 83 countries. Netflix already inked a deal for a second season which will continue to explore the romantic intricacies in this different version of the UK’s Regency era.

But just as more Netflix subscribers explored this period piece as narrated by the mysterious Lady Whistledown, a different TV show was rising. It would ultimately overtake Bridgerton’s audience for January. That’s Marvel WandaVision, which started streaming on Disney+ on January 15th.

Despite the significant differences between the two, Marvel’s first TV show for Disney+ turned out to be a massive hit, Variety reports.

All Bridgerton episodes were released on Christmas, meaning that anyone could binge-watch the entire 10-episode show immediately. Disney only releases one new episode a week for originals, a strategy it employed with the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. As a result, only three WandaVision episodes aired on Disney+ by the end of January. The series hasn’t even reached its end yet, with the finale scheduled for the first Friday of March.

That was enough for WandaVision to become the most viewed title of January 2021 across the platforms that connected-TV analytics provider TVision measured.

WandaVision had an indexed audience-size figure of 8,127, which means the show was 81.3 times mores viewed than average titles TVision measured across SVOD platforms. Bridgerton came in second with a rating of 6,808. The newest Pixar film launched on Disney+ just as Bridgerton premiered on Netflix. Soul was third in the rankings with 6,537 points.

As a reminder, Netflix said that 82 million households watched the series in the 28 days after Christmas, meaning plenty of people saw the TV series in January.

Also interesting are TVisions’ figures for time spent using streaming devices in the US. Netflix took the first spot with 23%, while Disney+ was fourth with only a 3% share.

TVision measures viewing impressions by counting viewers who have watched a title for at least two minutes inside a content watching session of at least five minutes. Netflix also counts viewership based on just two minutes of watching content. Variety’s full report, complete with more stats, is available here.