“Babenheimer” caused a ripple rather than a boom in Oscar ratings.
An estimated 19.5 million people watched Sunday night's 96th Academy Awards ceremony on ABC. This was the highest number for television broadcasting in the last four years.
But the upward trend comes from an all-time low during the pandemic, and was only a 4% increase from last year's estimated audience of 18.7 million viewers, according to figures released by ABC on Monday.
The Academy experimented with moving up the schedule for this year's show by an hour, and for the first time in years, blockbusters like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” that viewers actually saw received more nominations.
Ratings peaked in the final half-hour, when audiences watched Ryan Gosling perform “I'm Just Ken” from “Barbie,” Cillian Murphy won Best Actor and Christopher Nolan won “Oppenheimer.” Al Pacino won the Best Director award. Oscar for best picture in a bizarre presentation.
Megastar Emma Stone also won Best Actress in the final leg, beating Lily Gladstone in the night's most competitive race, with around 22 million people watching her performance.
The show actually started a little under an hour early. Host Jimmy Kimmel started the game about six minutes late because of the Gaza protests outside the Dolby Theater, which caused late entry, but it remains to be seen whether that affected viewership. It's unknown.
Last year's big Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was no slouch, grossing $143 million worldwide. But it's nothing like the “Barbenheimer” behemoth, with “Oppenheimer” approaching $1 billion worldwide and “Barbie” surpassing it.
However, the show's numbers did not rise as much as the Academy and ABC had hoped.
The Oscars surpassed viewership for the latest editions of other top awards shows that have experienced similar slumps. That 19.5 million viewers exceeded the 16.9 million viewers who watched the Grammys in February, while the Golden Globes and Emmys each had far fewer viewers in January.
For many years, the Academy Awards were often the second most-watched television show of the year, behind only the Super Bowl. Until 2018, the Oscars telecast never drew fewer than 30 million viewers, according to Nielsen records. The highest level was 55 million people who watched the cleaning of “Titanic” in 1998.
The number of viewers in 2014 was 43.7 million, which steadily decreased to 26.5 million in 2018, 29.6 million in 2019, and back to 23.6 million in 2020. The bottom fell out in 2021, when the pandemic diminished, and the number was 9.85. a million. In 2022, the year of the slap, he started to recover with 16.6 million cases.
Not all the blame lies with the movie and its creator. With the generational shift to streaming and other video formats, broadcast television viewership has plummeted, and few live events other than the Super Bowl draw the audiences they once did.
The Oscar win went to the sitcom “Abbott Elementary,” which drew a series-high 6.9 million viewers. This episode included an Oscar-related episode, starring Bradley Cooper as himself, and depicting him being roasted in a classroom after a long season of Oscar-winning campaigns.
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For more information on this year's Academy Awards, visit https://apnews.com/hub/academy-awards.