UPDATE 9/4: A different scoreboard has it going the other way — Samba TV’s household chart dropped Lanterns from No. 2 to No. 4 in America in week two.
UPDATE 9/3: It held. Lanterns won the week, 3,782 points to House of the Dragon‘s 3,298, and Episode 3 kept the show at series highs — its first weekly No. 1.
UPDATE 9/1: These numbers are the whole ballgame for a renewal — Season 2 is not confirmed, and Damon Lindelof’s own answer hangs it on whether the audience shows up.
We have to give credit where credit is due. It doesn’t seem as if Lanterns saw a drop in viewership from its first episode to episode two. Actually, just the opposite.
Episode 2 of the DC Studios series has posted the highest single-day total on HBO Max’s worldwide chart since the series arrived, according to FlixPatrol.
That beats the premiere’s own peak and blows past House of the Dragon, which had held the top of that chart almost every day since its August 9 finale without airing a single new episode.
A quick word on what these numbers are: FlixPatrol scores every show by its daily Top 10 position on HBO Max in nearly 60 countries. It’s not a measure of viewership.
So that means the higher a series ranks in more places, the more points it banks that day. It’s a popularity ranking, not a viewer count.
Recall that at one point the service said The Acolyte was topping the Disney+ charts, but we now know it was topping a garbage pile at the time. It just meant Acolyte trended because few people were watching.
But it’s also the only public, same-day scoreboard that exists for HBO Max, because Nielsen’s U.S. streaming data runs about a month behind and Warner Bros. Discovery only releases numbers when it wants to.
Here’s what that scoreboard now shows.
Episode 2 tops the premiere
Lanterns premiered Sunday, August 16, and WBD announced 9.3 million global viewers — 6.6 million in the U.S. — over the first three days.
On FlixPatrol’s worldwide HBO Max chart, the premiere peaked at 565 points on August 19, enough to knock House of the Dragon off the top spot for exactly one day.
Then the launch spike wore off, and from August 20 through August 24, Lanterns trailed House of the Dragon every day, a series whose Season 3 finale aired back on August 9.
Episode 2 ended all of it.
The new episode hit the chart on August 25 and drove Lanterns to 568 points on August 26. That is above the premiere’s peak, and the highest single-day mark any series has posted on the chart since August 18. It held at 567 on August 27.
On the same day of the premiere cycle, Episode 1 had already slipped to 552. The second episode isn’t just matching the launch; it’s holding better.
And in the United States, there was never a dip to begin with. Lanterns has been the No. 1 show in America on FlixPatrol every single day since at least August 19, through the launch spike, through the mid-week lull in the global numbers, and through Episode 2.
House of the Dragon runs out of momentum
While Lanterns climbed, House of the Dragon finally cracked.
The Game of Thrones prequel — which WBD says averaged more than 33 million viewers per episode this season — was still peaking at 566 points on August 21 on FlixPatrol, twelve days after its finale.
By August 26 it had fallen to 463, where it stayed on August 27: an 18% drop in six days, and its lowest level since Lanterns premiered.
What kept it aloft that long is that House of the Dragon charts in places Lanterns doesn’t — the Apple TV purchase store, Amazon’s channels, and a stack of international platforms where viewers were still buying and bingeing the Season 3 finale.
That cushion has been draining daily since the season ended, shrinking from roughly 88 points to about 50 over the past ten days.
The finale momentum was always going to run out. It ran out the same week Lanterns got stronger.
The Big Bang Theory spinoff Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is the sharpest contrast on the chart.
Its weekly episodes have been spiking in the worldwide rankings — it out-pointed Lanterns for three days last week — but each spike has evaporated within about three days.
Stuart went from 519 points on August 23, down to 348 by August 27, below the level it spiked from.
Lanterns‘ Episode 2 number, meanwhile, was still sitting at peak two days later. One of those patterns is a returning audience. The other is a curiosity click.
The weekly scoreboard
House of the Dragon won the August 17–23 week worldwide, 3,812 points to Lanterns‘ 3,005, with the footnote that Lanterns only charted six of those seven days following its Sunday-night launch.
This week has flipped: through August 27, Lanterns leads 2,168 to 1,999 on the worldwide HBO Max chart with three days remaining.
If that holds, it’s the show’s first weekly No. 1, earned in week two against a chart the Thrones juggernaut owned all summer.
Episode 3 streams Sunday, August 30 on HBO Max.
