The Top 25 Report

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (May 22 to 28, 2016)

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Summary: "Hold the door! Hothedoor! Hodador! Hodor!" Not since the Purple Wedding has Game of Thrones had such an impact on this list. The final few minutes of this week's episode, which simultaneously saw the death of a major character and revealed a hideously tragic ordeal at the core of his ruined life, sent the Internet into floods of blubbering. Within 24 hours, the "Hold the door" memes had almost crashed all of social media, much to the consternation, I am sure, of non-watchers of the show. In other TV news, AMC's comic adaptation Preacher has sparked some curiosity, while Kate Beckinsale managed to sneak into the list apparently on the strength of an appearance on The Graham Norton Show. Soccer saw three entries on the list, with José Mourinho's hiring by Manchester United, the UEFA Champions League final, and the upcoming Euro 2016 all getting notice. Other than that, not much to report. People are clearly taking advantage of the summer sun, because the top 25 had its lowest entry point since last October.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of May 22 to 28, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WMF TopViews, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	X-Men: Apocalypse	1,385,606	Hopes were high for this after the rapturous critical and commercial reception given to Bryan Singer's previous X-Men film, Days of Future Past; unfortunately the reviews for the followup have been largely negative, with the film struggling to reach a 60% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The $250 million it has so far earned so far worldwide is in line with Fox's expectations, but in a world where Batman v Superman can be considered a failure for not making $1 billion, this film is looking a bit pallid.
2	Game of Thrones (season 6)	964,616	The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April. And after this week's shock revelation, people doubtless turned to Wikipedia to check out future titles and see if they could guess where the story was going.
3	Captain America: Civil War	796,085	Off the top for the first time this week, though it can rest easy now that it has joined the increasingly not exclusive $1 billion club.
4	Frankie Manning	730,246	The pioneering dancer and co-creator of the Lindy hop got a Google Doodle on his 102nd birthday on May 26.
5	Game of Thrones	693,475	See #2.
6	Amber Heard	679,903	Oh boy, here we go again. It was bad enough you revelled in the public humiliation meted on her and her husband by the people of Australia, now you're leering at what appears to be a very rapid and messy marital dissolution. I could go into specifics, but I won't, because I neither know these people, nor care about their private lives.
7	Johnny Depp	658,094	After a string of tabloid-fuelling relationships in the 1990s, the cult star appeared to settle down for good with French actress Vanessa Paradis, only to separate from her in 2012 after 14 years. His subsequent four-year relationship with actress Amber Heard (see above) has not proven nearly so successful, for reasons I will not go into.
8	Deaths in 2016	641,993	The annual list of deaths, always a fairly consistent visitor to this list, saw its average views jump after the death of David Bowie.
9	Extreme Rules (2016)	561,021	WWE's latest pay-per-view pantomime took place on May 22, 2016, at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. The designated winner was Roman Reigns (pictured).
10	X-Men (film series)	561,021	The ever-more convoluted film series looks safe for now, and, thanks to the rather boring but still perplexing post-credits tease, people want to know what happens next.
11	Memorial Day	490,893	The last Monday in May (which was May 30 this year), the day that the United States chose to honour its war dead, is perhaps better known as the traditional beginning of US summer vacation, and is thus eagerly anticipated by millions of people too young to serve but old enough to stand in line for action movies.
12	List of Game of Thrones episodes	486,357	See #2.
13	Preacher (TV series)	444,862	A demonically-possessed preacher and a drunken Irish vampire set out to find a bitter, sulking God who has apparently abandoned his creation. A plot better-suited to our post-Breaking Bad/Game of Thrones subversive, battle-noir viewing habits is hard to imagine, and indeed attempts to adapt this comic series to the screen have been feverishly attempted for nearly 20 years. Oddly it took Seth Rogen, of all people, to pull it off, though he wisely cast Dominic Cooper (pictured) in the lead role.
14	Donald Trump	440,280	Trump's position in this list is likely secure at least until the convention, but the numbers keep falling, suggesting that, now that he is officially the nominee, people aren't interested in him or his theatrics any more.
15	José Mourinho	436,886	Two once-invincible forces in soccer (coach José Mourinho and team Manchester United) with a great deal to prove came together this week, under much uncertainty in Britain's famously unforgiving press. During his first stint as manager of Chelsea FC, Mourinho secured six trophies in three years; during his second stint, Chelsea lost nine out of 16 games. With Man U also in the wilderness after the departure of longtime manager Sir Alex Ferguson, this has the setup for a storybook ending, but such things seldom happen in English soccer.
16	Lyndon B. Johnson	435,660	The 36th President of the United States, who signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, enacted Medicare and Medicaid, but also escalated the Vietnam War, got the biopic treatment by way of Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston, who played him in the HBO movie All the Way, reprising his role in the original play.
17	List of Bollywood films of 2016	407,697	Generally a popular yearly list article, often slightly below the Top 25.
18	UEFA Euro 2016	386,950	The quadrennial international football event kicks off in France on June 10, potentially right in the middle of a series of strikes. The standoff is looking pretty grim.
19	List of The Flash (2014 TV series) episodes	386,025	This article keeps popping up on the lower rungs of the Top 25.
20	Kate Beckinsale	382,387	The eternally youthful actress (I'd believe her signature role as a vampire was not acting if I didn't know she had a 17-year-old daughter) had a confluence of noteworthy events this week; her Whit Stillman/Jane Austen film (seriously, how did that take so long?) Love & Friendship came out in the UK; her breakthrough role (for better or worse) in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor turned 15, and she appeared on an episode of The Graham Norton Show in which she revealed that she'd once perpetrated a fairly hideous prank. In memoriam of her now-legendary career misstep, she revealed how Michael Bay, throughout his promotional tour, repeatedly described her as "Not so attractive that she would alienate the female audience."
21	Preacher (comics)	379,091	See #13.
22	Overwatch (video game)	374,297	Blizzard Entertainment may be slightly angsty about the critical reception so far doled out on their upcoming Warcraft movie but at least they can reassure themselves with Overwatch, a colourful, zany team shooter ala Team Fortress 2 that has received rapturous acclaim and already become a fountain of fan art on the web, some safe for work, some not.
23	Emilia Clarke	368,128	a.k.a Game of Thrones' Daenerys Targaryen, she has always been the breakout star of the show, which might explain why she's on the list this week, given that the Mother of Dragons had barely a line in the actual episode. Of course, she has her new film Me Before You coming out on June 3, and was also with Kate Beckinsale in that Graham Norton interview (see #18).
24	2016 UEFA Champions League Final	323,873	The closest thing Europe has to the Super Bowl kicked off on May 28 at the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza in Milan; the relative lack of interest may have to do with the fact that both competing teams were from the same city: Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid.
25	United States	319,986	In a slow week, it is not surprising that this always popular article creeps into the Top 25.

Exclusions

This list excludes the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (~2% or less) or almost all mobile views (~95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Since WP:5000 and WMF Topviews use different exclusion algorithms, articles that appear in one but not the other can also safely be excluded as false. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish.

Note: If you came here from the Signpost article, please take any discussion of exclusions to this article's talk page.