“Babenheimer” caused a shock, not a boom. oscar evaluation.
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 record lows 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.
Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer helped boost viewership for the 96th Academy Awards. (Getty Images)
The Academy experimented with starting this year’s show an hour early, and for the first time in years, blockbuster movies like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” that viewers actually saw were nominated in large numbers.
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Ratings peaked in the final half-hour, when audiences watched Ryan Gosling take home the role of “I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie,” Cillian Murphy win Best Actor, and Christopher Nolan win Best Director. Heimer” and Al Pacino won the award. Capture the best Oscar statue with a bizarre presentation.
Ryan Gosling attends the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
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Megastar Emma Stone also won Best Actress in the final leg of the show, beating out Lily Gladstone in the night’s most competitive race, with an estimated 21 million people watching her performance.
Last year’s big Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was no slouch, grossing $143 million worldwide. But it’s nothing like the behemoth of “Barbenheimer”, with “Oppenheimer” approaching $1 billion worldwide, and “Barbie” surpassing it.
Cillian Murphy, Emma Stone, and Robert Downey Jr. won big awards at the 96th Academy Awards. (Getty Images)
However, the show’s numbers did not rise as much as the Academy and ABC had hoped.
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For many years, the Oscars 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. In 2021, when the pandemic diminished, the show was watched by 9.85 million people, and the bottom fell out. . In 2022, the year of the “slap,” it began to recover with 16.6 million people.
