‘The Mandalorian’ Nielsen Viewership Ratings Lower Than Season 2

The Mandalorian‘s ratings have declined in North America, as prematurely announced by third-party services like Samba TV — it has been confirmed by Nielsen via Variety. The firm measured 823 million minutes watched for The Mandalorian between February 27 and March 5. It came in at fifth place in the overall rankings of the week, behind HBO’s The Last of Us (which counts views on HBO Max alone) or Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.

 

Let it be noted that these 823 million minutes include the season 3 premiere, but also any previous episode of The Mandalorian. Meanwhile, a show like Murdaugh Murders, collected 1,084 million minutes with only three episodes, and The Last of Us had 1,011 million minutes with eight episodes (again, not counting people that watched it on cable Sunday night). It is especially concerning, though, that with one more episode, Nielsen is recording its all-time low viewership number for The Mandalorian — this doesn’t include season 1, as in 2019 Nielsen was not tracking streaming shows, but season 2’s lowest number was during the release of the third episode, where it amassed 873 million minutes watched (again, with fewer episodes available).

 

 

This figure, however, is still higher than all of The Book of Boba Fett‘s numbers, except for the week of the finale, where the Temuera Morrison-led series gathered 885 million minutes watched. It is also higher than all of Andor‘s ratings, but didn’t quite catch the performance of Obi-Wan Kenobi, except for two weeks (again, a series that had fewer episodes). By comparison, The Mandalorian season 2 premiere had 1,032 million minutes of viewing time as measured by Nielsen, while the finale amassed 1,336 million minutes.

 

It must be stressed that Nielsen, while more reliable than other companies, is still a third-party service (unlike Samba TV, they were able to practically reproduce Obi-Wan Kenobi being Disney Plus’ biggest premiere). Streaming numbers are essentially a black box to which only Disney Plus has access. Third-party data also points to Andor having a stronger presence internationally than in North America, but we really have no way of verifying that.

 

Looking at the numbers, we notice that The Mandalorian season 2 came out less than a year after the first season premiered, so it was still carrying a lot of momentum, and it also was released at the height of the fall 2020 COVID-19 peak, where everyone was at home and could check out the new episodes as soon as they came out. Things have gone back to normal now, and it’s been 2.5 years (The Book of Boba Fett acted as an interlude, but not everyone kept up with it), so it does make sense that we could see a bit of a decline, though the virtue of streaming is that these numbers can stabilize over time. Maybe it means that, instead of each person watching every episode twice in one week, people can only afford to watch it once now. They might also be watching it on their laptops at lunch break as opposed to on their TVs, which is what Nielsen tracks.

 

The Mandalorian
Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) in Lucasfilm’s THE MANDALORIAN, season three, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

 

Of course, these are all after-the-fact explanations that could be overruled by one simple truth — many people may have moved on. Only Disney can know exactly what is going on. We must also mention that, despite the season receiving a lukewarm reception, this accounts only for the premiere, so to know how they felt about the new season, they first had to watch it. We, therefore, expect these numbers to go down in the weeks to come, but they will likely go back up towards the tail-end of the season (as usual).

 

New episodes of The Mandalorian are coming out every Wednesday. You can check out Miguel’s review and discussion of Chapter 21 here, and come back next week for our breakdown of Chapter 22, which Bryce Dallas Howard is directing.

 

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Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.

Miguel Fernandez

Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.

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