GTA 6 ranks second in US audience excitement, behind only NFL football
GTA VI reached second place in TheWrap's weekly ScreenShare audience-excitement chart for August 29–September 4, with 6.4% of US entertainment mentions, behind NFL Football at 6.9%. The game sat at 4.5% in the last chart published before the August 27 Extended Look. The chart measures US conversation, not sales; GTA VI launches November 19.
Yes: right now, only the NFL is above GTA VI
Grand Theft Auto VI is currently the second most-talked-about entertainment property in the United States, behind only NFL football. That is the verdict of TheWrap's weekly ScreenShare chart for the week of August 29 to September 4, which ranks the game at 6.4% of entertainment mentions — against 6.9% for NFL Football and ahead of everything else in the top 10 (TheWrap). Less than three months before launch, a video game is holding its own against the country's biggest sport, its blockbuster films and its most-watched series.
What ScreenShare actually measures
The chart is not a sales ranking, a search index or a streaming count. ScreenShare is a data partnership between Screen Engine and TheWrap that tracks the ten most-mentioned entertainment options every week and whether each one has gained or lost momentum compared with the previous seven days (TheWrap). Films, television shows, sports and games are placed on the same list, which makes the result more telling: a game sharing that table with live sports is already rare, and sitting in second place is a stronger signal than any single trailer view count.
NFL owns the week, GTA VI owns the rest
The top of the chart is a duel between two very different worlds. NFL Football took first place at 6.9%, up from the previous week as the league's season got underway. Grand Theft Auto VI surged to second at 6.4% — also increasing — with TheWrap attributing the jump to anticipation built by Rockstar's August 27 release of Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look on Netflix (TheWrap). In the last ScreenShare chart published before that premiere (the week of August 15–21), the game sat at 4.5%, behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day at 8.4% and NFL Football at 4.8%. Two weeks later, it has leapfrogged the film and every other entertainment title to sit alone behind the NFL.
That trajectory matters because it shows the reveal did not produce a one-week spike. The Extended Look was the biggest gaming broadcast of the year — records that this site covered at the time — and the momentum has carried into September, when the only thing American audiences are mentioning more is live football. Reports of more than four million preorders and a 24% jump in Netflix app downloads around the premiere point the same way: interest is converting into concrete behaviour months before release.
What the chart does and doesn't prove
Some perspective is required. ScreenShare measures US conversation, not purchases: it tells you what people are excited about, not what they have bought. It is also a single weekly snapshot from one data provider, and Rockstar has made no comment about it. Hype is not the same thing as sales, and a game that has officially shown roughly 26 minutes of footage still has to prove itself on November 19.
Yet for a title that has not shipped, sustaining a top-two position in an all-entertainment ranking — ahead of films and series designed for mass audiences — is remarkable. It is also consistent with everything else measured since August: record viewership, surging app downloads, retail console bumps and preorder numbers that analysts describe as unprecedented. The chart adds one more data point to the same conclusion: GTA VI has moved beyond the gaming conversation and now sits in the mainstream entertainment conversation, with only live sport above it.
