Marvel: Falcon and Winter Soldier was Disney Plus’ most watched series debut

    
    The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is Disney Plus’ second original show knitted closely into the storylines of Marvel’s big-screen blockbusters.
    Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios
    

    The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was Disney Plus’ most watched series premiere yet,?Disney’s?Marvel?said Monday. The ranking, based on viewing from the show’s premiere Friday through Sunday, didn’t include any hard numbers for the amount of watch-time spent on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s first episode.
    After?The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Disney Plus’ most watched opening weekends for original shows were WandaVision in January and the second-season premiere of The Mandalorian in October. Marvel didn’t say which of those had more viewers.?
    The milestone for The Falcone and the Winter Soldier is partly a function of Disney Plus’ rapidly expanding subscriber base. Popular series that’ve debuted more recently are more likely to have been watched by more people at their premieres than the shows that came before, when fewer people subscribed to the service.?
    For example, The Mandalorian –?Disney Plus’ breakout success — had its initial series premiere the same day the service itself launched, when it went live only in the US, Canada and the Netherlands.?Disney Plus’ subscriber base was a fraction of the size then: Disney Plus had less than 29 million subscribers?three months after The Mandalorian series premiere versus the more than 100 million subscribers?that Disney Plus surpassed earlier this month.?
    Even WandaVision, another?Marvel?original series, premiered just 10 weeks ago on Jan. 15 — but that was before Disney Plus launched more widely in Europe as a part of Disney’s latest streaming service, Star, in late February.?