Loki Just Broke A Major Record For Marvel
Loki just broke a major Marvel record with its first episode. It looks like Disney+ and Tom Hiddleston have a hit on their hands here.
Loki premiered this week on Disney+, bringing us back into the world of one of Marvel’s most popular characters, someone who’s been on both sides of the villain and hero coin (mostly the former). But picking up with the character who simply can’t be put down is proving to be a wise choice by the team at Marvel. The new show is looking like it might be incredibly popular for the streaming platform. The first numbers are in and Deadline is reporting that Loki was the highest-rated premiere for any Marvel Disney+ series.
Deadline’s numbers for the Loki premiere come via Samba TV and they point to a show that could become a major hit for Disney+. According to the data, close to 900,000 households tuned into the show’s premiere. That eclipsed the previous two Marvel series offerings, WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier which did 655,000 and 759,000 viewers respectively. The almost 20% increase in viewing from their previous best show is a major accomplishment for Loki. It’s getting eyeballs and generating buzz right out of the gate.
And if there’s going to be staying power over the course of the season when it comes to ratings and viewership, Loki is already coming strong from the jump. The opening reviews of the show have it at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes with Giant Freakin Robot’s Drew Dietsch also giving it 4/5 Robots in his review. Here’s what he had to say in what was mostly a glowing review of the first episode “Glorious Purpose”:
“This feels like our true plunge into the deep end of Marvel’s weirder alternate worlds and Tom Hiddleston feels like the perfect guide to lead us through some wild and wacky adventures.”
It will be interesting to see where the Loki numbers land when it’s all said and done over the weekend. Samba TV continues to track the ongoing process of each show and will release numbers after the initial run through the week. It’s well on pace to top the previously reported high for that timeline which was 1.7 million accounts streaming The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. These are unofficial numbers though with Samba taking its cue from Nielsen and only tracking households who opt into the service. Because some streaming services, like Disney+, don’t report their viewership publicly for every program, third parties are often left determining popularity along these lines.
Loki tracks Tom Hiddleston’s titular character following the events of Avengers: Endgame. That’s when we saw him scoot off with the Tesseract after the failed intercept by Captain America crew when they time skipped back to the events of the original Avengers. This move by Loki put him on the radar of the Time Variance Authority which monitors schisms in the space-time continuum. And now Loki is being micromanaged by a mid-level executive in the company, Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) in an effort to correctly reset the timeline.
This new series will be in line with the other two Marvel series and will run in a limited fashion for six episodes. Considering what Tom Hiddleston brings to the characters and the hot start coming out of the gate, Loki could end up being a smash for Disney+ when it’s all said and done. This has been such a strong start for Marvel’s Phase Four as they move into new series on Disney+. After relying on the big box office theater hits for years, this pivot into a new story structure and delivery has been a massive success.
