It was a lucrative holiday period at the North American box office these past two weeks, with titles like Avatar: Fire and Ash, The Housemaid, Marty Supreme, Anaconda, and Zootopia 2 bringing a welcome diversity of hit movies after an underwhelming fall. But during that period, the biggest single-day gross posted by any release wasn’t really a gross – or a movie. It was the series finale of the Netflix TV show Stranger Things.
Netflix made a deal to put the feature-length episode in theaters simultaneously with its streaming debut, and estimates put the numbers for the 24 hours’ worth of shows, beginning at 8pm on New Year’s Eve and continuing throughout New Year’s Day, around $25m. That’s bigger than any single day of Avatar: Fire and Ash after its opening weekend. In fact, if the Stranger Things release banked over $30m, as some estimated, that would make it the second-biggest 24 hours for any release in December, beaten only by Avatar 3’s opening day.
As it happens, those numbers are a little dicey – not just because Netflix doesn’t release box office grosses for its occasional theatrical releases, but because contractual issues dictated that the tickets for th
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