Climber Alex Honnold’s ascent of one of the world’s tallest buildings drew a sizable audience for Netflix, but the live special didn’t reach the pinnacle of the streamer’s weekly viewing charts.
Skyscraper Live, which streamed on Jan. 24 — a day later than scheduled due to weather concerns — collected 6.2 million views worldwide Saturday and Sunday, according to Netflix’s internal data. That was good for third among English-language shows for the week of Jan. 19-25.
The 116-minute special, which followed Honnold as he climbed the facade of the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan, drew 12 million hours of viewing (Netflix and much of the industry calculates views as total viewing hours divided by run time). The move from Friday to Saturday might have depressed Skyscraper Live’s view count some, both because it had less time to rack up viewing before the end of the week and because Saturday is typically the lightest night of the week for TV viewing.
Netflix has leaned more into live programming in the past year and change, but Skyscraper Live is the company’s first program in this particular made-for-TV spectacle niche, so comparisons aren’t easy. It came in well behind the streamer’s NFL games on Christmas — as would be expected — but had more than double the amount of views for the Jan. 19 WWE Raw (2.5 million).
The limited series His & Hers, starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal, led the Netflix series charts for a third straight week, scoring 17.2 million views. Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials came in second among English-language shows with 8.7 million views. Leading every title on the platform was The Rip, a heist movie starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. It had 40.4 million views worldwide, down only slightly from 41.6 million for its premiere week.
