HBO's The Last Of Us hits 1 billion minutes streamed in a single week

The Last of Us has taken the world by storm, and some new viewing figures have revealed just how wildly popular the show is.

If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that yesterday (or in the early hours of this morning for UK viewers), the penultimate episode of season one finally aired. Don’t worry if you’ve not watched it yet, because that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Feels weird to think that the season finale will be upon us in a week’s time though, doesn’t it?

Take a look at the teaser trailer for the final episode of The Last of Us’ first season below.

Anyway, as Deadline reports, according to data from Nielsen, between 30 January and 5 February, viewers watched the show for a whopping 1.19 billion hours. Those figures are from streaming on HBO Max alone, so that doesn’t even begin to take into account those watching on Now TV, Sky, or any other streaming platform. Just to put it into perspective, that number translates to over 2264 years of viewing, which is absolutely wild.

Although The Last of Us’ fourth episode released on 5 February, we can guess that a lot of that viewing time will have gone towards episode three, ‘Long, Long Time’. Bill and Frank’s love story was as beautiful as it was heartbreaking, and is personally my favourite episode of the series so far. Viewers have been demanding that Nick Offerman should be given every award possible for his performance as Bill - some even said that Offerman’s portrayal of the character ‘changed their minds’ about straight actors playing gay characters.

The final episode of season one is set to air on Sunday 12 March for viewers in the U.S., and Monday 13 March for those in the UK. At the time of writing, we don’t know when the second season will be hitting our screens, so be sure to make the most of it while you can.