We finally have some official viewership numbers coming out of Netflix’s GTA 6 extended look, and wouldn’t you know it, it was absolutely massive.
Rockstar took an unconventional approach in revealing its most in-depth GTA 6 trailer so far by making it exclusive to Netflix for a few hours before unleashing it elsewhere online. Temporarily locking the showcase behind a paid subscription was a potentially risky move, but it seems to have paid off in a big way, with Netflix reporting 31.1 million views in the four days between its debut and the end of the streamer’s viewing window for its top 10 rankings. That made GTA 6 the most-watched title (it’s categorized as a movie on the platform) across the entire Netflix library for the week in which its new trailer debuted.
For comparison, the next most-watched movie was the star-studded thriller The Whisper Man, which premiered on Netflix the day after GTA 6’s deep-dive on August 28, at 23.2 million views for the week. Meanwhile, the most-watched TV show for the same week was the mega-viral true crime documentary, Death of the Pastor’s Wife, which clocked in at 19 million views.
GTA 6’s Netflix extended look was big big, but it’s nowhere near the streaming service’s biggest debut for an English-language title if we’re going by first-week numbers. That honor goes to Stranger Things season 5, which netted a mind-boggling 59.6 million views in its debut week.
Of course, comparing these numbers to the amount of views GTA 6 pulls on a platform like YouTube is really like comparing apples to oranges. For example, it only took GTA 6 trailer 2 a few hours to hit 19 million views on YouTube, but YouTube is free and easily accessible for most people with phones, while viewers had to pay for and sign in to Netflix to watch the latest trailer.
Just as crucially, the way Netflix and YouTube track views is very different. YouTube simply counts a view as any click that starts a video, and for views-tracking purposes it doesn’t matter if the person watches a second, minute, or hour of the video. One click equals one view. On Netflix, the streamer tallies up the total amount of hours watched and then divides that by the movie or TV show’s runtime. With the GTA 6 extended look being about 27 minutes long, that means it accumulated around 14 million hours of viewing time in its debut week, which is staggering regardless of context.