The third season of Bridgerton recorded the show’s biggest opening weekend to date.
According to Netflix’s internal rankings, the first half of season three racked up 45.05 million views (total hours watched divided by running time) worldwide after its May 16 premiere. That’s about 165.2 million hours of viewing time.
By comparison, season two debuted in March 2022 with just more than 193 million hours of viewing time globally — but that was for a full season, with a running time more than twice as long as the first half of the current season. Thus its opening weekend view count is around 22.7 million. Season two also had a three-day opening period vs. four for the current run, but one extra day only accounts for a small part of season three’s lead. (Netflix didn’t publicly release weekly viewing tallies for season one.)
The shorter run time for the four episodes of season three (220 minutes vs. 510 minutes for the whole of season two), and the fact that Netflix now has about 50 million more subscribers worldwide than it did in March 2022, also helped Bridgerton achieve its series-high opening weekend.
In addition to breaking its own opening weekend mark, Bridgerton also recorded the highest single weekly view count for any Netflix series, regardless of language, since the streamer started ranking its titles by views in June 2023. It ranks second among all titles in single-week views since then, behind only the Millie Bobby Brown-led movie Damsel, which had 50.8 million views in mid-March.
