‘Cross’ is a massive hit for Amazon Prime Video, initial viewership numbers suggest

The series is the third biggest debut for an Amazon series this year.

By Joe Allen Published December 6, 2024

Aldis Hodge in Cross — Amazon Prime Video

It might not have all the flash of a streaming service like Netflix, but Amazon Prime Video can command a pretty large audience. Variety is reporting that Cross, the series that adapts James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels, has drawn 40 million viewers in the first 20 days of its release.

Prime Video says that those viewership numbers make Cross its third biggest series of the year, behind just the first season of Fallout and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2. Amazon had previously reported that Fallout hit 65 million viewers in 16 days, and Rings of Power hit 40 million in 11 days, growing to 55 million over the course of a month. It’s also the streamer’s sixth biggest launch of all time over the course of 20 days, with 55% of the show’s audience coming from outside of the United States. Germany, the U.K., Brazil, Canada, and Spain, in particular, are apparently seeing “outsized performance.”

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Amazon does not define what it means to be a “viewer” of one of its shows the same way that Netflix and Disney do. Both of those streamers take the total minutes spent watching the show and divide that by the length of the show. For Amazon, it could simply mean that someone tuned in to the show for five minutes before clicking away.

The series stars Aldis Hodges as the titular character and also stars Isaiah Mustafa, Juanita Jennings, Alona Tal, Samantha Walkes, Caleb Elijah, Melody Hurd, Jennifer Wigmore, Eloise Mumford, and Ryan Eggold. Cross is a Black metropolitan detective, and the books and show chronicle various cases that he’s on.

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Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…

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