Oscar Viewership Rises 4% As ‘Oppenheimer’-Dominated Ceremony Starts An Hour Earlier
12.03.2024 - 00:02
/ deadline.com
It’s not the near sweep that Oppenheimer had, but ABC certainly has something to celebrate out of last night’s Academy Awards.
With the final numbers in, 19.5M viewers tuned in to watch the 2024 Oscars, according to Nielsen data. That’s a 4% win over the 18.8 million who tuned in for the 95th annual Academy Awards in 2023, propelling the show to a 4-year audience high.
The telecast also was at a 3.8 demo rating, compared with last year’s 4.0 — down, but not by much.
Perhaps it was naked John Cena or Ryan Gosling’s energizing performance of Barbie‘s “I’m Just Ken” that pushed the audience over the edge.
It probably didn’t hurt that the 2024 Oscars saw blockbusters like Christopher Nolan’s bio of the man who created the atom bomb and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as serious main contenders — a rarity in recent years of big movies being up for big prizes.
Whatever the reason or reasons, with this lift, ABC finally has the bragging rights to say that this was not one of the least-watched Oscar ceremonies of all time. Viewership has been on a steady incline over the past several years, rising quite heftily from the hostless 2021 Oscars, which drew an audience of 10.4 million.
In 2022, the year of the slap seen around the world when subsequent Best Actor winner Will Smith took a whack at presenter Chris Rock, viewership leapt up to 16.6M.
In that context, note that this year’s Oscars started an hour earlier that usual, running from 7 pm ET/4 pm PT to around 10:25 pm ET/7:25 pm PT. Moving the kick-off to earlier Sunday was an attempt to keep the broadcast and hence advertisers and viewers in primetime. That’s a departure from way too many previous years when the Oscars ran well past 11 pm ET.
Still, even with that and this year’s