Amazon has scored its biggest hit ever with its series adaptation of writer Lee Child's popular "Jack Reacher" novel series.
Reacher, which stars the hulking Alan Ritchson appropriately casts in the role of Child's eponymous, vagabond former Army super cop, premiered Feb. 4 and captured 1.843 billion minutes of U.S. viewing in its first three days on Amazon Prime Video, according to Nielsen's weekly published streaming metrics.
The previous audience high for an Amazon Prime Video show came in March of 2021, when Eddie Murphy's long-awaited comedy film sequel Coming 2 America debuted to an audience of around 1.4 billion U.S. viewing minutes.
For the week of Jan. 31 - Feb. 6, Reacher was the second most streamed show in the U.S. next to Netflix's Ozark, according to Nielsen, but that's kind of misleading. Ozark's fourth season debuted back on Jan. 21, so Nielsen's tally includes a full week of Ozark viewing, as well as watching of three subsequent seasons of the dark Jason Bateman/Laura Linney drama.
Amazon has already renewed Reacher for a second season.
Netflix typically dominates Nielsen's chart simply because at around 75 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, it's audience dwarfs its competitors. It's not like, say, measuring broadcast networks in days of yore, when viewers pretty much all had more or less equal access to the same content.
Other notable factoids regarding Nielsen's latest weekly report: The Walt Disney Animation film Encanto continues to soar for Disney Plus, yielding more than 1 billion weekly viewing minutes once again. It's done that ever since it left theaters and debuted in SVOD back on Dec. 24.
The Hulu original series Pam & Tommy, which premiered Feb. 2, commanded just 312 million viewing minutes for the week of Jan. 31 - Feb. 6.
