When it was first announced that Zack Snyder’s Justice League was being released onto HBO Max as a single four-hour movie instead of an episodic miniseries, the news proved somewhat divisive among fans. That was strange in itself, especially in the age of the streaming service we currently live in where people are happy to binge six, eight or even ten episodes of a TV series in a single sitting.
There’s this odd disconnect these days where the idea of viewing one really long movie without interruption causes consternation, but watching an entire season of television in the space of a day is much more palatable. That’s one of the reasons why the Snyder Cut is split into six distinct chapters, because it gives audiences time to hit the pause button and do whatever they need to do in the meantime without hurting the flow of the story.
New data from analytics firm Samba TV has now revealed that 1.8 million households in the United States watched the all-new Justice League during its opening weekend, but a deep dive into the figures saw the company determine that only a third of those viewers checked out the entire four-hour epic from start to finish without stopping for a breather.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that two thirds of the people who started the Snyder Cut gave up long before the end and switched it off, but it does signal that the movie resulted in a number of different viewership habits. For example, there were definitely a lot of folks who strapped in for the whole four hours, while others would have preferred to watch one or two chapters at a time instead, and there admittedly were probably a select few who gave up after finding themselves unconvinced. Either way, Justice League 2.0 has been both a vindication for Zack Snyder and a huge success for HBO Max, whatever way you choose to interpret the data.