LOS ANGELES — Whether it was the lingering drama of The Slap or the prominence of blockbusters in one of the best picture race, an even bigger audience was lured back to the Oscars this yr.
The ninety fifth Academy Awards, which aired Sunday night on ABC, was viewed by an estimated 18.7 million, in accordance with preliminary Fast National Live+Same Day numbers released Monday by ABC.
That’s up 12% from last yr’s show — and was a three-year high — but was still low in comparison with most years.
The evening’s fundamental counterprogramming, the season finale of “The Last of Us” pulled in 8.2 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max.
The show began at 9 p.m. EST, an hour after the Oscars began.
A frequent criticism of the Oscars is that the show celebrates movies that don’t have wide appeal.
This yr was markedly different, nonetheless, with two billion-dollar blockbuster sequels in the combination: “Top: Gun Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” were each nominated for best picture. Angela Bassett was nominated for a Marvel movie, a primary.
Even the winning film, A24’s “All the things In every single place All at Once,” remodeled $100 million at the worldwide box office and played in theaters for months.
For a few years, the Oscars were often the second most-watched television program of the yr behind the Super Bowl.
Until 2018, the Oscar telecast had never slipped below 30 million viewers, in accordance with Nielsen records. The high-water mark was the 55 million individuals who watched “Titanic” clean up in 1998.
From the 43.7 million who watched in 2014, viewership declined steadily to 26.5 million in 2018, then went back as much as 29.6 million in 2019, and 23.6 million in 2020.
The underside fell out with the pandemic-diminished show in 2021, seen by 9.85 million, nevertheless it rebounded last yr to 16.6 million, which was the second lowest-rated show ever.
Jimmy Kimmel, who presided over the ceremony in 2017 and 2018, returned to host the show, parachuting onto the Dolby Theatre stage.
The show also featured performances from pop stars like Rihanna and Lady Gaga.
Broadcast television viewership has gone down across the board within the streaming era, and awards shows have illustrated that.
The show boasted 27.4 million total social interactions across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and was the No. 1 worldwide trending topic on Twitter for its duration.
By Monday afternoon, Ke Huy Quan’s acceptance speech had over 1.3 million views on YouTube, and Brendan Fraser’s was as much as 2.6 million.
The ABC broadcast also had 1.8 million views of the American Sign Language live stream.
“What we desired to do was exit and execute a show that folks would love and a show people would speak about,” Oscars producer Glenn Weiss told The Hollywood Reporter within the hours after the show.
“We expect we did accomplish that. I sure hope that (Monday) delivers excellent news within the rankings front, but either way, I believe it was a successful evening.”
