There were no changes to the top five on Parrot Analytics’ digital originals chart the week ended June 1, with “Stranger Things” remaining at No. 1 for the second consecutive week.
The third season of the Netflix science-fiction horror series, set in 1985, won’t debut until July 4, but the show shot to the top of the chart the prior week due to mounting hype – fueled by a clever marketing campaign that includes several real-world tie-ins, including the return of Coca-Cola’s ill-fated “New Coke,” introduced that year, and “Stranger Things”-inspired ice cream flavors at Baskin-Robbins.
Despite a subsequent 8.5% drop in Demand Expressions, “Stranger Things” retained its grip at No. 1, with 54.4 million Demand Expressions to 46.3 million for second-ranked “Lucifer,” based on a character from the DC Comics comic-book series “The Sandman.”
Demand for “Lucifer” was relatively unchanged from the prior week. The series stars Tom Ellis as Lucifer Morningstar, aka the devil, who moves to Los Angeles to run his own nightclub and serve as a consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The DC Universe series “Doom Patrol” remained at No. 3 with 34.6 million Demand Expressions, a slight gain of less than 3% from the prior week, while another DC Universe series, “Titans,” repeated at No. 4 with 33 million expressions, just a half percentage point more than in the prior week.
YouTube Premium’s “Cobra Kai,” a sequel to the 1984 movie The Karate Kid, again came in at No. 5 on the digital originals chart despite a 4% drop in Demand Expressions to 31.2 million.
A “digital original” is a multi-episode series in which the most recent season was first made available on a streaming platform such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Hulu.
Demand for Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was up less than 6% from the prior week, but the bump was enough to send the dystopian drama to No. 6, up from No. 8 the prior week.
Media Play News has teamed with Parrot Analytics to provide readers with a weekly top 10 of the most popular digital original TV series in the United States, based on the firm’s proprietary metric called Demand Expressions, which measures global demand for TV content through a wide variety of data sources, including video streaming, social media activity, photo sharing, blogging, commenting on fan and critic rating platforms, and downloading and streaming via peer-to-peer protocols and file sharing sites.
