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They’re running out of gravity-related puns and references over at NBCUniversal, where Wicked continues to find new ways to work its magic on the company’s bottom line. Having already conquered the box office and raked in $100 million (and counting) via digital sales, the Universal Pictures–produced musical marvel is now conjuring up all sorts of records for Peacock — and not just through viewing of the movie itself.
As Peacock announced late last month, Wicked racked up 882 million minutes viewed in its first three days on the service (March 21 to 23), passing Oppenheimer to become the most-watched theatrical debut in the platform’s five-year history. And when Nielsen officially reports data for the week of March 17 to 23 next Thursday, Wicked is expected to become only the second Peacock-streamed feature to open at No. 1 on the ratings giant’s streaming movies chart. But it turns out that many of the folks coming to stream Wicked are also sticking around to check out the slew of companion content Peacock has packed onto the platform. An NBCU rep tells Vulture that the full suite of Wicked bonus content — everything from a sing-along version of the movie and multiple making-of documentaries and featurettes to a half-dozen deleted and extended scenes — has generated 82.4 million minutes of viewership as of earlier this week. And subscribers who are watching that sing-along edition of the movie are double dipping: Peacock says about three out of every four sing-along viewers also watched the original version of the movie.
Peacock had been making a concerted effort to event-ize the biggest feature films it gets from its sibling movie studio. As it did with Oppenheimer, the service built an entire hub around Wicked, gathering the movie and bonus features together in one place, along with other content it thought fans of the movie would want to check out. It also engaged with superfans of the Wicked franchise by releasing Glinda and Elphaba avatars for user profiles; the two witches immediately became the most-selected franchise-based character avatars on the service, bumping poor Tom the Minion to No. 3. Given how well the Wicked and Oppenheimer rollouts went, look for Peacock to make blockbuster-centric hubs a more regular occurrence and perhaps even expand the idea to include some of its Universal library titles.
