‘Penguin’ Takes Flight: HBO Touts Strong Ratings for First Two Episodes
Viewers appear to be flocking to The Penguin.
The HBO series starring Colin Farrell as the notorious DC Comics villain has racked up 10.4 million cross-platform viewers for its series premiere, which debuted Sept. 19. That 11-day figure, according to HBO, is outpacing every other current HBO series over a similar time frame, other than its two biggest ones: House of the Dragon and The Last of Us.
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Last week, HBO reported that The Penguin’s first episode stood at 5.3 million viewers after four days of release, meaning about 5.1 million more people watched in the subsequent week. Sunday’s second episode, meanwhile, gathered 1.6 million viewers across all platforms (including a couple of on-air replays), a 17 percent improvement on night one for the premiere.
The third-season finale of Industry followed The Penguin on Sunday with 260,000 first-night viewers. That falls short of the night one series high of 370,00 that the show set earlier this season, but as a whole season three has drawn a third more viewers than season two did (1.6 million per episode versus 1.2 million). HBO has already picked up a fourth season of Industry.
The Penguin was initially not slated to be an HBO series; instead, the offshoot of Matt Reeves’ 2022 feature film The Batman was intended to run exclusively on Max, HBO’s streaming sibling. As part of a shift in branding, however, The Penguin — along with fellow DC-based drama Lanterns and the forthcoming Dune: Prophecy, Welcome to Derry and Harry Potter series — moved under the HBO originals umbrella in June, meaning they will run both on Max and the HBO cable channels.
It’s impossible to say whether The Penguin would have pulled in the same number of viewers were it solely on Max. The on-air premiere of the series on Sept. 19 drew 242,000 viewers, roughly 18 percent of its first-night total. But the additional linear showings, along with the imprimatur that HBO carries, probably helped boost the audience at least to some degree.
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