1.8 million households watched Zack Snyder's Justice League in its opening weekend in the US - but only one-third of those viewers finished the film. The Snyder Cut has finally become a reality, with auteur director Zack Snyder's four-hour movie streaming on HBO Max. Now, the triumphant fan campaign is understandably turning its attention to restoring the so-called "Snyderverse." As such, metrics for the film's performance are being pored over to see whether or not the Snyder Cut has been a success for HBO Max.
Streaming services tend to be pretty secretive, but fortunately, several impressive data analytics firms swiftly compile data to give a sense of the performance of movies and TV shows. Samba TV is typically one of the first responders, and they've revealed 1.8 million households watched the Snyder Cut in the US over its opening weekend. This means the Snyder Cut was more popular than Falcon & Winter Soldier episode 1, although it didn't beat Wonder Woman 1984's 2.2 million opening weekend. That's not much of a surprise, though, given the Snyder Cut released on a random Thursday in March, whereas Wonder Woman 1984 dropped over the holiday period. Unfortunately, however, a deep-dive into these figures suggests they aren't quite as impressive as they seem.
In an interview with Sylabdul Inc., Samba TV's director Jeffrey Silverman explained that Samba TV count a viewer as someone who has watched over five minutes of a film or TV show. That's much more precise than some rival analytics firms, who frequently count a view if a person tuned in to just one minute, but in the context of a mammoth four-hour movie, it's not much of an indicator. When Samba TV checked the completion rate for the Snyder Cut - that is to say, the proportion of those 1.8 million households who finished the film - they found only 1/3 of households watched all four hours.
It's worth noting this doesn't necessarily mean two-thirds of viewers who turned on the Snyder Cut decided to switch it off partway through. Many households have opted to watch Zack Snyder's Justice League in installments, splitting it up into two or three segments, or perhaps even watching one of the six chapters at a time. But it certainly means it's too soon to get a measure of the Snyder Cut's popularity, simply because viewing figures in and of themselves aren't a good metric here. It may be better to hold off celebrating (or commiserating) until a fortnight when it's possible to get a sense of how many households finish the four-hour film. No doubt HBO will be monitoring all this themselves, curious to work out how good an investment the Snyder Cut was.
This new information also serves as a helpful reminder that data needs to be placed in context to appreciate its value entirely. 1.8 million households tuning in to the Snyder Cut, only narrowly behind Wonder Woman 1984, sounds impressive - right up to the moment you understand what that data means. The first episode of Falcon & Winter Soldier was just 50 minutes long, meaning it's reasonable to expect a much higher completion rate. Wonder Woman 1984's runtime was just 2 hours 31 minutes, meaning many more households are likely to have finished that film in one sitting. Comparisons need to be made carefully and cautiously, and Zack Snyder's Justice League's actual performance may not be known for quite some time.
Source: Samba TV, via Sylabdul Inc.
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