Viewership for the third season of The Mandalorian appears to be trending in the wrong direction based on a report from Samba TV, but IMDb user ratings also appear to back up that report.
Following the Season 3 premiere of the show, Samba TV reported that the episode only drew in 1.6 million households between March 1st and March 5th.
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While this was significantly more households than Samba TV reported for the Season 2 premiere, it had less viewership than what Samba TV reported for The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Samba TV reported the Season 2 premiere drew in 1.04 million U.S. households.
The analytics organization also reported The Book of Boba Fett drew in 1.7 million U.S. households in its first five days of streaming.
As for Obi-Wan Kenobi they reported the premiere drew in 2.14 million U.S. households in its four days on Disney+.
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It appeared The Mandalorian Season 3 was already off on the wrong foot as it was getting beat by shows that came out in 2022 despite The Walt Disney Company adding new subscribers to their Disney+ streaming service in the time between the conclusion of Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian Season 3 premiere.
Not only does it appear based on Samba TV’s reporting that the show got off on the wrong foot, but IMDb user reviews indicate the show might be bleeding viewers with every episode.
The premiere episode received a 7.5 weighted average rating from 13,434 reviews. By the second episode the number of reviews declined to 11,250 despite having a much higher 8.4 rating.
The third episode received the worst rating of the show’s entire run with a 7.2, but like the second episode it saw the number of actual reviews decline as well. Only 10,123 users reviewed the third episode.
That third episode’s might have also been a signal for others to abandon the series entirely as the fourth episode only received 5,342 reviews albeit it did receive a much higher 8.0 rating.
If one wanted to extrapolate these numbers, it’s possible the show has lost over half its audience in just four episodes. The decline in reviews from the premiere episode to the fourth episode is over 60%.
Granted, it’s possible not all the people who reviewed the previous episodes have watched the fourth episode yet. They might be waiting until the weekend to watch and then will share their reviews then.
However, one can still see a trend from the premiere episode to the third episode. Nearly a quarter of the people who reviewed the premiere episode did not review the third episode. The number of reviews declined by 24.6%.
There might be a silver lining in the fact that the drop from the premiere episode to the second episode was only 16.2% while the drop from the second episode to the third episode was only 10%.
But if the drop from the third to the fourth remains about where it is, it can only be described as disastrous for what many call the flagship Star Wars show on Disney+.
While these IMDb user ratings do give us another data point that appear to show people are tuning out of The Mandalorian and Star Wars TV in general, a much better picture will become available in the coming weeks when Nielsen releases their viewership data for the weeks when The Mandalorian aired.
What do you make of the significant decline in IMDb user ratings for each episode of The Mandalorian in Season 3?