Reacher is Amazon’s first series to top Nielsen’s streaming chart

Reacher is a true hit for amazon! Reacher has collected 1.589 billion streaming minutes to give Prime Video its first-ever No. 1 finish in Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings for February 7 to 13. Per Deadline, the show saw a decline in the 1.843 billion minutes from the prior week, though it still managed to overcome Netflix’s Sweet Magnolias with that show pulling in 1.556 billion minutes. This also follows Reacher surpassing The Wheel of Time to become Prime Video’s most-watched show.

During its first week, per The Hollywood Reporter, the Nielsen Report shows Reacher’s streaming ratings hit 1.84 billion minutes viewed across its eight episodes. The figures represent the viewing numbers from the week of January 31, 2022, through February 6, 2022, and Reacher’s ratings are made even more impressive because the show didn’t premiere until February 4, 2022. This means that even with a truncated window for viewership numbers, Reacher still hit those heights.

As previously reported, the figures for Reacher are the highest that any Prime Video series has received in a single week since Nielsen began reporting streaming numbers 19 months ago. Prime Video has had a lot of luck with literary action series and their reboots. They found success with Jack Ryan, starring John Krasinski as the iconic Tom Clancy character, and now Reacher. The series is based on the novels by Lee Child and was previously adapted for the big screen starring Tom Cruise, beginning in 2012 with Jack Reacher which was then followed by a 2016 sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Cruise’s first film was relatively well-received but it did face criticism from fans of the source material because Jack Reacher is described as being an incredibly tall, imposing man while Tom Cruise stands at 5-foot-7-inches. On the Reacher TV series, he is played by the hulking Alan Ritchson, who stands at 6-foot-2-inches and is all muscle.

Jack Reacher was first adapted for the big screen in 2012 starring Tom Cruise. The film, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, was based on Lee Child’s 2005 novel “One Shot” and was met with decent box office but a mixed critical response. Costing $60 million to make, the film ultimately grossed $80.1 million at the domestic box office and $218.3 million worldwide. The film received a 64% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Cruise’s performance was lauded as “smoothly charismatic” but fans of the books, as mentioned before, complained about Cruise’s lack of resemblance to the character as described in the book. A sequel followed in 2016 called Jack Reacher: Never Go Back but the box office and critical response were much more muted. The film grossed $58.7 million domestically and $162.1 million globally on a $96 million budget and critics graced the film with a dismal 37% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes.

On Reacher, Jack Reacher is a former U.S. Army military policeman that visits the fictional rural town of Margrave, Georgia, and quickly becomes embroiled in a violent clash with a brutal criminal conspiracy. The series also stars Malcolm Goodwin, Willa Fitzgerald, Chris Webster, Bruce McGill, and Maria Sten.

Have YOU been watching Reacher and contributing to it being the most-watched series on Amazon?