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      With Its Future at Stake, the Academy Tries to Fix the Oscars (Again)

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      The awards telecast has been losing viewers for years. New leadership wants to reverse that starting Sunday, and ensure the financial well-being of the organization.The stage design for the 95th Academy Awards on Sunday is more Doctor Strange modern and less Dowager Countess musty. That means plentiful video screens, including ones that cover the sides of the theater, with nary a Swarovski crystal curtain — the old standby — to be seen.Unlike last year, when eight categories were awarded during a nontelevised portion, all of the Oscars will be handed out live on air. To make the telecast interactive and help viewers better understand crafts categories, such as sound mixing and art direction, QR codes will appear before commercial breaks to direct viewers to internet vignettes about the nominees and behind-the-scenes footage and photos.To reinvigorate the red carpet preshow, Oscars organizers hired members of the Met Gala creative team. Expect much more star power, specialized lighting (to make a process that happens in daylight seem more like evening) and better integration with the theater’s entrance.But some of the most important changes — part of an urgent effort to help make the Academy Awards more relevant to young people and draw a broader international audience — involve things that most viewers won’t notice. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will post video of acceptance speeches in the six biggest categories in near real-time on TikTok and Facebook, and all speeches will quickly be posted on Twitter. In a first, Disney+ will stream the Oscars show live in parts of Europe. The academy has also sought out new marketing partners like Letterboxd, a social media site for movie fans (8.4 million members, most of them are ages 18 to 34), in a sad-but-true admission that it must convince people that they should care about the Oscars.“We didn’t have to before,” Janet Yang, the academy’s president, said in an interview at the organization’s Beverly Hills offices. “We could rest on our laurels and just let it carry itself.”Last year’s telecast drew 16.6 million viewers, with a spike in ratings coming after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesOne might respond with exasperation: You’re only now figuring that out? Perhaps the time to pull out all the stops to keep the Oscars vibrant was five years ago, when the telecast, for the first time, attracted less than 30 million people, a 20 percent decline from the previous year. Since then, the number of viewers for the Academy Awards has dropped another 37 percent, according to Nielsen’s data. About 16.6 million people watched “CODA” win the Oscar for best picture at the most recent ceremony, with viewership swelling after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage late in the show.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.But Ms. Yang can’t be held responsible. She was elected president only in August. The academy also has a new chief executive for the first time in 11 years; Bill Kramer, the former director of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, was appointed to that role in June. Together, Ms. Yang and Mr. Kramer have brought a blast of fresh air to the stuffy organization, working to improve transparency, calm a membership revolt over last year’s removal of several categories from the live Oscars telecast and shore up the academy’s wobbly finances.In the past, Ms. Yang said, “a lot of cultural institutions felt like they should be sitting on a hill, a little bit more protected, almost untouchable.” She added that the academy itself felt “ivory tower-ish,” but that it was now “a different time” and “a different culture.”ABC has exclusive rights to broadcast the Oscars ceremony until 2028 and provides the academy with about 80 percent of its annual revenue. Last year, Oscar-related revenue was $137.1 million, according to financial disclosures. Awards-related expenses totaled $56.8 million.The TV network generated an estimated $139 million across 70 commercials during last year’s show, according to Vivvix, which tracks ad spending. (To compare, ABC pulled in about $129 million across 56 ads in 2020.) A red-carpet preshow brought in an additional $16 million in advertising revenue.From left, Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Steven Spielberg, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Cruise are among this year’s nominees.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesTo secure a distribution contract of similar value when its deal with ABC expires, the academy must reverse viewership declines. A less lucrative deal could imperil some of the organization’s year-round activities, including film restoration. “This is so important to the livelihood and future of the organization that we better confront it,” Ms. Yang said.In many ways, however, the academy is hamstrung when it comes to reinventing the Oscars telecast.ABC and other traditional television networks are shadows of their former selves, with younger audiences in particular decamping en masse to streaming services. Some other awards shows are following them, notably the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which will stream live on Netflix starting next year. After an ethics, finance and diversity scandal, the Golden Globe Awards, long broadcast on NBC, are also looking for a new distribution partner.Many viewers have long complained that the Oscars ceremony is overlong, with groan-inducing banter between presenters adding to a feeling of bloat. Last year’s Academy Awards was three and a half hours, despite moving eight of the 23 awards off the live broadcast. (The offscreen acceptance speeches were recorded, edited and incorporated into the live show.) In the past, the Oscars telecast has run as long as four hours and 23 minutes. Jimmy Kimmel will return as the host on Sunday, having previously served as M.C. in 2017 and 2018, and he has been planning a traditional monologue.“We are working very hard to deliver the show on time with all disciplines honored,” Mr. Kramer said.Ariana DeBose won best supporting actress during last year’s Academy Awards, which was three and a half hours.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesLinda Ong, the chief executive of Cultique, a consulting firm in Los Angeles that advises companies on changing cultural norms, said that people were still interested in the award show’s winners and the things they had to say. The problem for the academy, she said, is that “people don’t feel the need to watch the show to be part of the conversation.”“They just watch some clips on social,” she added.Ms. Ong noted that, in a once-unthinkable move that speaks to the Oscars’ fading relevancy, the season finale of HBO’s hugely popular post-apocalyptic drama, “The Last of Us,” will broadcast head-to-head against the ceremony. “That’s a big cultural tell,” she said.The academy is hopeful that Nielsen’s ratings meters for the Oscars will tick upward on Sunday. Big musical stars, including Rihanna, are scheduled to perform their nominated songs; Lenny Kravitz will perform during the “In Memoriam” segment. Lady Gaga will be absent, though, with Oscars producers saying on Wednesday that she was too busy filming a movie to perform her nominated song from “Top Gun: Maverick.”The nominee pool for best picture has never before included more than one billion-dollar ticket seller, according to box office databases, and this year there are two. “Top Gun: Maverick” collected $1.5 billion, and “Avatar: The Way of Water” took in $2.3 billion. The front-runner for best picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” generated $104 million in ticket sales. (Viewership tends to increase when popular films are nominated.)But the academy says it’s not just about TV anymore — that relying on Nielsen’s numbers alone to assess relevancy is outdated, and that online chatter and streaming-service viewing should also be taken into account. “We have to rethink our success metrics,” Mr. Kramer said, noting that the Oscars will be available for viewing on Hulu the next day.Conversations on social media during and after award shows can be significant. Last month’s Grammy Awards, for instance, attracted about 12.6 million viewers. On the day of the ceremony and the next day, the Grammys generated about seven million mentions on Twitter, according to ListenFirst, an analytics company.If nothing else, the academy is hoping for a smooth show on Sunday. In the past, the academy started to plan for the Oscars as late as November. This time, planning started in June.“It should be about unity and celebrating this industry,” Mr. Kramer said. “People are still consuming movies. People love movies. Perhaps they’re doing it on streaming more than they did a few years ago. But our art form is as relevant as ever.” More

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      Will Anyone Give ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ a Chance?

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      Olivia Wilde’s new film is trying to fight free of its pre-release reputation.Years ago, when I was a film critic, I was asked out for coffee by a guy who’d just been hired at the review-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t remember the purpose of the meeting. I just recall the sense — as he ventilated about the site’s “Tomatometer” rating, which would soon crush all my elitist insights into hard data — that I’d been summoned to witness the digging of my own grave.This was actually fine with me. I was already demoralized by the whole enterprise. I’d always seen the role of the critic as a conduit, someone who has an aesthetic experience and then reports on what it was like; I never cared to tell others what to see or avoid, imposing a hegemony of tastes and interests that I didn’t believe in. At work, though, I was feeling the pressure to serve readers with ratings and recommendations — and, increasingly, sites like Rotten Tomatoes seemed to push a binary of “good” and “bad,” all based on consensus. It was depressing, all this holding up of fingers to the wind. Consensus is a snowball with a hard, mineral center, barreling down a slope, and few people want to be on the wrong side.Sometimes consensus accretes around the story of a movie, even before people see the film itself. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a screening of “Don’t Worry Darling,” which I’d been looking forward to since first getting a glimpse of its poster. I had been vaguely aware of some noise emanating from the film’s press rollout, I suppose, but it wasn’t until the now-infamous spit video that I realized just how much flak the movie was catching. The video showed Harry Styles, one of the film’s stars, approaching his audience seat at the Venice Film Festival, suavely buttoning his jacket, leaning down and then — according to nothing but gleeful online supposition — purportedly hocking a loogie on another of the film’s stars, Chris Pine, who stops clapping and, with his eyes, traces a trajectory from Styles’ lips to his own lap. No actual spit is discernible in the video, and no motive was ascribed. But none were needed. Those few frames of video were scrutinized, analyzed, slowed, zoomed, dissected and compared to the Zapruder film so often that the joke begged for mercy.People were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark.To me, though, the Cold War artifact it recalled was Kremlinology — the practice of scrying every available scrap of information to discern the hidden motivations and power struggles of distant, unknowable figures. The events that drew such close attention to “Don’t Worry Darling” were not huge ones, in the scheme of things: They included a supposed feud between the director, Olivia Wilde, and the lead actress, Florence Pugh, possibly involving a pay gap between leads; the actor Shia LaBeouf’s being replaced, under disputed circumstances, with Styles; LaBeouf’s leaking messages from Wilde about Pugh; Wilde’s being served with custody papers from her ex-fiancé, Jason Sudeikis, while onstage at CinemaCon; and, above all, Wilde’s becoming romantically involved with Styles, 10 years her junior. Where the theoretical animosity between Styles and Pine was supposed to fit in was unclear. But by then people were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark — as long as it kept building the story of a woman who fostered a work environment so fraught that one star would spit on another, in public and on camera, for no apparent reason.More on ‘Don’t Worry Darling’In this much gossiped-about feminist gothic, Florence Pugh plays a seemingly happy housewife whose world starts to crack apart.Review: “If Pugh’s performance never gets beneath the shiny, satirical surface, it’s because there’s no place for it or her to go,” our critic writes of the film.Publicity Crisis: It was one of the hottest projects in Hollywood. But a series of missteps on the promotional trail, hinting at supposed feuds and behind-the-scenes drama, have raised questions about the film’s viability and about Olivia Wilde, its director.Bad Reputation: Amid all the rumors and negative press, a vocal portion of the public seems to have grown oddly invested in witnessing Wilde’s comeuppance. Will that affect the movie’s ratings?“Don’t Worry Darling” is just the most recent example of a film maudit, or “cursed film.” That was the term coined for Jean Cocteau’s Festival du Film Maudit in 1949, describing works that had been wrongfully neglected, or deemed too outrageous to merit serious attention — “movies rendered marginal by disrepute,” as J. Hoberman would later write in The Village Voice. Films made by women are not the only ones stuck in this defensive position, but they seem disproportionately prone to it, often with criticism centering on the director herself. (Elaine May’s experience on “Ishtar” was such that Hoberman classed her as a cineaste maudit; she wouldn’t direct again for decades.) Hints of a production’s chaos or excess are less likely to be taken as signs of unruly genius, and more often framed as messiness or lack of authority. The more that talk swirled around “Don’t Worry Darling,” the more its quality — and then, specifically, Wilde’s competence — were called into question.Out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.Cinema has a century’s worth of lore about films troubled by budget overages, clashing personalities and on-set affairs: Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s wanting to kill each other while making “Fitzcarraldo,” mental breakdowns on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” Peter Bogdanovich’s leaving his actual genius of a wife after an affair with a young Cybill Shepherd on “The Last Picture Show.” These productions were plagued by bad press and rumors, but they never faced the wrath of stan Twitter. These days, fans spread rumors and memes, which are picked up by media outlets, which disguise their prurience with speculation about box-office prospects or reviews. Then out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.But of course the idea that this consensus opinion emerges from some pure, objective place is disingenuous. Press always colors reviews — and now some vocal portion of the public seems oddly invested in Wilde’s comeuppance, a fact we may see reflected in ratings. (Given statements Wilde has made about some of the film’s real-world inspirations, it’s not hard to imagine the online response including the kind of organized backlash that has greeted other disfavored films.) And while critics’ responses won’t be actively malicious, they won’t be magically free of their own biases, either. “More or less the definition of the history of cinema,” Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker in 2012, “is: the stuff that most of the best-known critics didn’t like, or damned with faint praise — it isn’t that they didn’t care for it, but that they didn’t care about it.” Male film critics outnumber female ones 2 to 1, and tend to award “slightly higher average quantitative ratings to films with male protagonists,” according to studies conducted by Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.It’s odd that this could be the fate of “Don’t Worry Darling,” a film about men trapping women in a regressive, suffocating place where dissent means repudiation and exile — a film whose big plot developments must be hard for Wilde to resist talking about, given how much the narrative surrounding the film echoes their point. But it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the story, so I’ll just share an anecdote. My 14-year-old daughter came with me to the screening, unencumbered by external baggage. When the credits began to roll, she announced, “That was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” Seeing Wilde’s name among the cast, she asked which character the director had played. When I told her, she was impressed. She said: “I want to be her. I want to do what she does.” It made me happy to hear this. And then I started to worry.Source photographs: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images; Screen grab from Warner Bros.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl” and a contributing writer for the magazine. She frequently writes for the magazine’s Screenland column. More

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      Ratings for the Tony Awards Rebounded, but Remained Low

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      The Tonys drew an audience of 3.9 million viewers on CBS on Sunday, about a million viewers more than last year. It was the second-lowest viewership on record. The Tonys bounced back.The 75th Tony Awards drew an audience of 3.9 million viewers on CBS on Sunday night, about a million viewers more than last year’s ceremony, according to Nielsen.The ratings comeback follows a monthslong trend where award shows, at least for now, have been rebounding from record lows. This year’s Oscars drew 16 million viewers, up from last year’s low of 10 million viewers. And the Grammys had a small ratings bump to over 9 million viewers this year.Even with the rebound, Sunday’s ratings performance was still significantly lower than the 5.4 million viewers that tuned in for the 2019 Tonys. This year marks the second-lowest viewership total since records have been kept.The Tonys likely benefited from a return to its traditional June time slot, when viewers are accustomed to watching the show. There was also significantly less competition on Sunday night, with most of the broadcast networks airing repeats. Last year, the delayed Tonys ceremony aired in September and had to go head-to-head against a prime-time Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers nail biter.Sunday’s Tonys broadcast, which was hosted by Ariana DeBose, was a chance for Broadway to put on a show for millions at a moment when ticket sales are still significantly down from before the pandemic.New York was the highest rated market in the country, with San Francisco and West Palm Beach right behind it, according to Nielsen. More

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      Oscars Audience Jumped After Will Smith’s Slap of Chris Rock

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      The Oscars audience swelled by more than half a million people on Sunday shortly after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, capping the awards show with a late-night surge.At 10:27 p.m., Mr. Smith attacked Mr. Rock after the comedian delivered a joke onstage about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Nearly 17.4 million viewers were watching in the minutes after the slap, up from 16.8 million shortly before it, according to Nielsen data released by ABC.Mr. Rock, who was presenting an award, had taken a jab at the close-cropped hair of Ms. Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia, a condition that leads to hair loss. Mr. Smith walked onto the stage, struck Mr. Rock, and then returned to his seat and loudly demanded, using expletives, that the comedian refrain from talking about Ms. Pinkett Smith. Mr. Smith’s words, as well as Mr. Rock’s responses, were silenced during the broadcast, leaving many viewers struggling to understand what had happened and speculating whether the incident was scripted. (It was not.)Until that point, viewership had been tailing off. The largest audience measured by Nielsen came earlier in the night, when nearly 17.7 million people watched Troy Kotsur, the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar, deliver a heartfelt acceptance speech for his supporting role in “CODA.”Viewership dropped off quickly after the attack, but then surged again during the period when Mr. Smith, who was the heavily favored front-runner in the best actor race, returned to the stage to claim the award for his role in “King Richard.” About 17.4 million people watched his speech, according to the Nielsen data.On Monday, Mr. Smith apologized for his actions. Earlier that day, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it was conducting a formal review of the incident.Overall, the Oscars drew 16.6 million viewers, around 4.9 million of them 18 to 49 years old, according to Nielsen. The audience was 58 percent larger than the all-time low of 10.4 million people who watched last year, but was still by far the second smallest viewership on record. ABC said that the Oscars drove 22.7 million interactions on social media, a 139 percent increase over last year’s broadcast. More

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      Why 'American Crime Story: Impeachment' Won't Stream Until Next Year

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      There was a lot of advance hype for the FX series “American Crime Story: Impeachment.” But it won’t be available on any major streaming platform for another 10 months, and that’s a problem in 2021.It was one of the most dramatic episodes of the season. Monica Lewinsky, the heroine of “American Crime Story: Impeachment,” strikes an immunity deal with federal prosecutors, and President Bill Clinton admits to having had an affair to a grand jury and the nation as a whole. The episode also brought Hillary Clinton, portrayed by Edie Falco, to center stage for the first time.The only thing missing was a big viewing audience.“American Crime Story: Impeachment,” a series that attracted lots of media coverage before its September premiere, airs on the FX cable network Tuesdays at 10 p.m. Last week’s episode ranked 15th in the ratings for cable shows that day, tied with ESPN’s “Around the Horn” and MTV’s “Teen Mom.”Produced by Ryan Murphy, “American Crime Story: Impeachment” has a lot going for it, including an A-list cast (Clive Owen, Sarah Paulson, Beanie Feldstein, Ms. Falco) and the sumptuous production touches that Mr. Murphy’s fans have come to expect of his shows.Edie Falco as Hillary Clinton on the FX show “American Crime Story: Impeachment.” An A-list cast has not meant big ratings.Kurt Iswarienko/FX The last two seasons of the anthology series, which tackles a new subject each time out, won Emmys for best limited series. And although Variety criticized the current installment as an “overwrought rehash,” the reviews overall were “generally favorable,” according to the website Metacritic.So why hasn’t the show landed with viewers in a big way? Why isn’t it a regular part of Twitter’s top trending topics? The answer lies in the fact that “American Crime Story: Impeachment” is not available on any major streaming platform and won’t be for another 10 months.The same was true for the initial rollouts of the previous seasons. But millions of viewers have cut the cord since then, ditching cable for some combination of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, AppleTV+ and other services.Fans of “American Crime Story: Impeachment” who miss an episode can still stream it, but only if they are armed with their cable-subscription user names and passwords. And in 2021, a show that’s not easy to stream risks becoming almost invisible.The reason for its absence from the big streamers has to do with a deal worked out in 2016 by FX’s parent at the time, 21st Century Fox. For an undisclosed sum, the company sold the streaming rights to all editions of “American Crime Story” to Netflix. Both sides agreed that the series would be available exclusively on FX for roughly a year. From then on, Netflix would make it available to its subscribers.The deal seemed reasonable to 21st Century Fox in 2016. Back then, cable was still a robust business, and viewers were still in the habit of watching a program at a certain time on a certain night of the week.The first season of “American Crime Story,” about the O.J. Simpson case, premiered early in 2016 and was a big hit, although it was not available on any major streaming platform. At the time, video-on-demand technology was still emerging, and Netflix had 80 million subscribers, meaning it had less of a reach than FX, which was then available in 92 million households.“The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” with Cuba Gooding, Jr. as O.J. Simpson, came out in 2016, when FX had reached more households than Netflix.Ray Mickshaw/FXThe pandemic accelerated the trend of viewers dropping cable subscriptions in favor of the watch-when-you-want experience of streaming. Netflix now has 213 million subscribers, and FX is available in 76 million homes.Viewers accustomed to the largely commercial-free experience of streaming would have had a flashback to the days of traditional TV while watching the most recent episode of “American Crime Story: Impeachment” on Tuesday night. The roughly 80-minute show included five commercial breaks that took up 18 minutes and 25 seconds. A sixth commercial break, three minutes long, came between the final scene and the preview of the next week’s episode.Scripted cable shows are still very much a part of the cultural conversation — as long as they’re streaming. All of HBO’s scripted shows, a lineup that includes “Succession,” “White Lotus” and “Mare of Easttown,” appear weekly on the HBO channel itself while also streaming on HBO Max. HBO said that digital viewing for the third season premiere of “Succession” was “up 214 percent from last season’s premiere,” which came out in 2019.FX sends most of its new series to a streaming portal, FX on Hulu, which like FX itself, is now owned by the Walt Disney Company. Because of the 2016 deal, “American Crime Story: Impeachment” is not among the shows that go to Hulu.Before the show’s premiere, John Landgraf, FX’s chairman, conceded that the world had changed substantially in the years since the Netflix deal, telling The Hollywood Reporter he could “not remember the last time that there was a really water-cooler show that was scripted on a linear cable channel.”“I just don’t know whether the pipes are still there to galvanize people’s attention,” he continued. “But we’re going to find out.”Mr. Landgraf and FX declined to comment for this article.Despite the lack of buzz, “American Crime Story: Impeachment” still gets weekly write-ups in Vanity Fair and Vulture. The series also has the eighth highest ratings of any scripted show on cable this year. The 2016 installment, about O.J. Simpson, ranked fifth, and the 2018 version, centered on the murder of the fashion mogul Gianni Versace, was also eighth.The audience figures tell a different story, though. “American Crime Story: Impeachment” draws an average audience of 571,000 viewers among adults under the age of 50, according to Nielsen’s delayed viewing data. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” had more than double that audience, with 1.2 million, and the O.J. Simpson season had an average of 3.9 million viewers.By the time of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” with Edgar Ramirez as Gianni Versace, left, and Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace, cable was losing viewers to streaming.Ray Mickshaw/FX, via Associated PressIn 2016, the No. 1 rated scripted cable series, AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” averaged 11.3 million viewers among adults under the age of 50, according to Nielsen’s delayed viewing data. By 2018, “The Walking Dead” viewership average had fallen to 5.3 million. This year its adult audience average is 1.3 million — and it still ranks No. 1.Why did 21st Century Fox executives think so highly of the arrangement they had struck with Netflix deal five years ago? At the time, Mr. Landgraf called it a “phenomenal deal from a financial standpoint.” James Murdoch, then 21st Century Fox’s chief executive, said it was “a great deal for the company and for shareholders.”Never mind that many television executives, even then, were already concerned that the sales of their back libraries to Netflix might backfire. The more Netflix had to offer its subscribers, the easier it was for it to attract new subscribers. That, in turn, enabled it to spend billions on original series and big-time talent.In 2018, Netflix signed one of the most successful producers in cable — Mr. Murphy — to a contract worth $300 million. Under the deal’s terms, he was allowed to keep making the series he had already started at FX and Fox. After that, his new shows would belong to Netflix.FX will broadcast the ninth episode of “American Crime Story: Impeachment” on Tuesday and the season finale Nov. 9. More

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      Nielsen Introduces New Ratings for Streaming Services

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      The company known for measuring television ratings said Netflix and YouTube are far ahead of their digital rivals, but viewers still spend more time watching cable and network TV.Nielsen on Thursday announced that it had moved a step closer toward cracking one of the great questions of the modern entertainment world: How big, exactly, is streaming? More

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      Super Bowl Ratings Hit a 15-Year Low. It Still Outperformed Everything Else.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySuper Bowl Ratings Hit a 15-Year Low. It Still Outperformed Everything Else.The game between two marquee quarterbacks was not competitive. Still, the Super Bowl is expected to be the most watched television program this year.Television viewership for the Super Bowl was down 9 percent compared with last year.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesFeb. 9, 2021Updated 4:20 p.m. ETSunday’s Super Bowl was watched by just 91.6 million people on CBS, the lowest number of viewers for the game on traditional broadcast television since 2006. A total of 96.4 million people watched when other platforms — like the CBS All Access streaming service and mobile phone apps — were counted, the lowest number of total viewers since 2007.Still, the Super Bowl will surely be the most watched television program of 2021, and the N.F.L. is expected to see a huge increase in television rights fees when it signs several new television distribution agreements over the next year.After peaking at 114 million television viewers in 2015, television ratings for the Super Bowl have declined in five of the past six years. The 9 percent decline in television viewership from last year’s Super Bowl is roughly in line with season-long trends. N.F.L. games this season were watched by 7 percent fewer people than the season before.Many of the necessary ingredients for a bonanza Super Bowl were present. The game featured an intriguing matchup between the two most popular quarterbacks in football, Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs. The weather Sunday was freezing across much of the country, which traditionally drives people inside to be entertained by their televisions. But the game itself failed to deliver, all but ending by the third quarter when the Buccaneers led, 31-9, with no fourth-quarter scoring or hint of a competitive game. Viewership is measured as the average of the audience watching at each minute of the game; the longer a game is competitive and viewers stay tuned in, the better.The hype and marketing machine surrounding the game was also changed by the coronavirus pandemic. The N.F.L. credentialed about 4,000 fewer media members for the Super Bowl compared with last year, meaning fans saw less media live from the Super Bowl ahead of the game. Fans were discouraged from gathering for parties, and instead of staying home and watching alone, it seems many just did something else. Just 38 percent of all households with a television were tuned to the game, the lowest percentage since 1969, according to Nielsen.The N.F.L. joins almost every other sport in seeing viewership declines over the past year. The pandemic shut down the sporting world for months in the spring, and when games resumed they frequently lacked energy with few or no fans in the stands. Games were often played on unusual days or at unusual times, disrupting the traditional sports viewership calendar.Viewership for the N.B.A. finals was down 49 percent and for the Stanley Cup finals was down 61 percent. It is not just sports. Compared to this time last year, viewership of all broadcast television — CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox — is down 20 percent during prime time. In that context, a 7 percent season drop and a 9 percent Super Bowl drop is a comparatively decent showing for the N.F.L.Importantly, it also won’t slow down the N.F.L.’s march toward lucrative new television contracts. All indications — including deals made by other leagues and the competitive demand among networks and streaming services — suggest that the league will sign new agreements over the next year with a significant increase in average annual value.Even in a world of fractured viewership that is quickly moving toward streaming, the N.F.L. remains king. Of the 100 most viewed television programs in 2020, 76 were N.F.L. games, according to Mike Mulvihill, an executive at Fox Sports. And while the 38 percent of households tuned to the game was a modern day low for the Super Bowl, the last time that number was beat by anything other than an N.F.L. game was the 1994 Winter Olympics, according to the website Sports Media Watch, when the figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding competed amid the scandal of Harding’s involvement in an attack on Kerrigan.The N.F.L. could become the king of streaming, too. According to CBS the Super Bowl averaged 5.7 million viewers streaming the game, 68 percent more than last year.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More