LANTERNS May Not Be the Massive Streaming Hit HBO Max Says It Is

Lanterns has been presented as a major streaming win for HBO Max, but once you look beyond the numbers HBO has been celebrating, the picture gets a little more complicated.

Shortly after the DCU series premiered, HBO Max announced that the first episode, “Pilot,” pulled in 9.3 million viewers worldwide over its first three days. It was hailed as one of HBO’s biggest series launches, and the numbers climbed from there. The controversial third episode, “OutKast,” was later reported to have reached 10 million viewers worldwide.

Those are impressive-sounding numbers, but streaming data can be tricky because there’s so little context for what they actually mean.

Is 10 million worldwide viewers a huge audience for a show like Lanterns? Maybe. For some perspective, another Damon Lindelof series, Lost, premiered on ABC in 2004 with more than 18 million viewers in the United States alone.

Obviously, television consumption has changed dramatically since then, so it isn’t a clean comparison, but it shows how difficult it can be to judge streaming success based on a global number released by the platform itself.

Nielsen’s streaming charts give us another way to look at how Lanterns is performing in North America, and those numbers aren’t quite as massive as HBO Max’s announcements might suggest.

Nielsen has now released three weeks of Top 10 streaming data covering the series. Because Nielsen combines viewing across all available episodes of a show, we can get a broader look at how much time audiences are actually spending with Lanterns.

The show failed to crack Nielsen’s Top 10 during both the August 17 to 23 and August 31 to September 6 chart periods. That means the premiere and then the first two episodes combined weren’t enough to get the series onto the list.

During those periods, Lanterns logged fewer viewing minutes than reruns of Modern Family, which generated 455 million minutes watched, and American Dad!, which reached 480 million minutes.

Things finally changed once episode three arrived. In its third week, Lanterns reached No. 8 on Nielsen with 500 million minutes watched. That’s certainly a respectable showing, but there’s some additional context worth considering.

The total included three complete episodes along with several hours of viewing for episode four on the night of September 6. It needed all of that combined viewing to move ahead of NCIS and The First 48.

There’s also a pretty funny reality check here. While Lanterns may be sitting at No. 1 on HBO Max, its overall streaming numbers still weren’t enough to outperform shows such as Bluey and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Never underestimate the power of cartoon dogs and sea sponges! None of this automatically makes Lanterns a flop. Far from it. Creature Commandos never appeared on Nielsen’s charts, while Peacemaker Season 2 only reached No. 10 after its finale aired. Compared with those DCU projects, Lanterns making the chart after three episodes is a solid result.

What the Nielsen numbers do is put HBO Max’s cumulative 10 million viewer announcement into perspective. A big worldwide total sounds great in a press release, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a series is dominating the larger streaming landscape.

There are some complications with the Nielsen data as well. Lanterns appears on the acquired programming chart, which makes direct comparisons a little messy, although its numbers would put it in roughly the same territory on the originals chart.

We also don’t currently know whether the show’s weekly audience is growing, declining, or remaining relatively consistent. Comparing it with competing superhero series isn’t much easier.

Disney+, for example, hasn’t released comparable specific worldwide viewer totals for its MCU shows. For all we know, Lanterns could be crushing those series globally or coming in well below them.

What we can say is that the show appears to be doing well without showing the kind of Nielsen dominance you might expect after hearing HBO Max tout those worldwide numbers.

Audience reception has also been pretty strong. Lanterns currently holds a 93% critics score and 74% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 7.8/10 rating on IMDb and a 72 “Generally Favorable” score on Metacritic.

So, is Lanterns successful? HBO Max certainly has numbers it can celebrate, and finally landing in Nielsen’s Top 10 is nothing to dismiss. At the same time, Nielsen gives us some much-needed context and shows why streaming viewership announcements should always be examined a little closer.

Ten million viewers sounds huge. The more interesting question is what those 10 million viewers actually represent in today’s fractured streaming world.