Fallout, Amazon Prime Video’s latest big-budget TV series effort, has quietly emerged as the platform’s biggest premiere audience draw of all time.
While conceding the adaptation of a popular video game is “one of the service’s top three most-watched titles ever” as it renewed the show for season two just nine days after its April 10 premiere, Amazon would not provide first-party audience performance data.
For its part, Penske Media Group research company Luminate said Fallout drew 2.5 billion viewing minutes in the U.S. in its first full week of release, April 12-18. That was around three times as much viewing engagement as the second-ranked show on Luminate’s ranker, Netflix’s Unlocked: A Jail Experiment.
Meanwhile, a PlumResearch data analysis puts first-week U.S.-only viewership for the post-apocalyptic action series, produced at a reported first-season budget of $153 million, at as high as 53 million views and 47 million streaming hours from April 11-15.
That makes Fallout Amazon’s most successful U.S. TV premiere of all time, PlumResearch said, adding that the previous best week for an original was the 28 million views garnered by The Boys during the week of its July 2022 season finale.
PlumResearch said Fallout, which is also available globally, currently occupies around 30% of viewing time in “most” international markets. In the top 15 markets, it generated 91 million viewing hours and 102 million views, the researcher claims.
The same data suggests that the series is drawing viewers back to Prime Video to complete the eight-episode first season, with 9.7 million U.S. Prime profiles tuning back in to watch. That’s the streamer’s biggest yield of returning customers yet, according to PlumResearch.
“Fallout has clearly been a resounding success for Prime, receiving widespread acclaim and almost instant renewal for season 2,” Plum research director Jonathan Broughton said in a statement. “While the viewing across the first few days of the series has been unprecedented, reaching as high as 45% in some markets, it does remain to be seen how this plays out longer term.”
Unlike Reacher and other Prime Video original shows, Fallout dropped all of its eight episodes at once, breaking a sequential, week-by-week pattern adopted in recent years for series including The Boys, The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
That likely had much to do with the initial surge in viewership, as collective viewing for Fallout’s first season has already made it the streamer’s second most-viewed property of the year, behind Reacher.
