On July 3, Disney+ debuted a live recording of Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit broadway play Hamilton as a feature film. Now, 7Park Data reveals that Hamilton outperformed the competition offered by Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon in July 2020 in terms of viewer numbers. This came as a surprise to exactly no-one.
A blend of three performances with the original principal Broadway cast members, Hamilton was originally set to release in theaters on October 15, 2021. However, with nearly everyone in the world in some form of quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic, Disney opted to instead release Hamilton exclusively on Disney+ in July 2020. The film was released to near-universal acclaim and gratitude from those who had been unable to purchase tickets since the play premiered Off-Broadway in February 2015.
Variety reports that 37% of 7Park Data's panel of viewers in the U.S. watched Hamilton in July, nearly three times the number of people who watched Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries reboot in the same month, which ranked as the second widest-reaching title at 14%, roughly. In 7Park's tracking of Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, and Apple TV+, Hamilton accumulated the largest audience of any single program over the course of one month this year. In June, Netflix's Space Force was watched by 8% of the panel viewers, a far cry from the audience earned by Hamilton over the course of the following month.
Although 7Park's data counts watching just two-minutes of a program towards its share of viewership, Hamilton still ranked as the top streaming title by time spent watching, which is measured by the percentage of total minutes viewed by the research firm's panel members across measured the five aforementioned streaming services. The data from 7Park Data arrives just weeks after separate app analytics firms reported that U.S. downloads of the Disney+ app were boosted during the 4th of July weekend debut of Hamilton.
The success of Hamilton could be a good sign for the upcoming Disney+ debut of the live-action Mulan remake. Much like the feature film presentation of Hamilton, the retelling of Mulan was slated to be released in theaters before the coronavirus pandemic eventually led to Disney opting to make the film available on Disney+ at extra cost.
Hamilton is now available on Disney+.
Source: Variety