The Oscars Got a Barbenheimer Ratings Boost

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Rich Polk/Variety via Getty Images, Gregg DeGuire/WWD via Getty Images

Thanks to a big Barbenheimer boost — and a ton of viral social-media moments — the 2024 Oscars scored a post-pandemic high of 19.5 million viewers Sunday night on ABC, per preliminary Nielsen data. That’s nearly a million more than last year’s broadcast and represents the biggest tune-in for any awards show since February 2020.

While not a massive gain from last year, it’s still up and continues the slow recovery of awards shows after pandemic restrictions helped push events to record lows. What’s more, this year’s Oscars broadcast had two big hurdles working against it in terms of topping last year’s numbers: The show started an hour earlier than in recent years and aired on the first day of Daylight Saving Time. The number of homes using television traditionally takes a big hit when the time change occurs, as the combination of more daylight (and usually nicer March weather) gives folks an excuse to stay outside a bit later, rather than huddling in front of the TV set. And this year, it was also possible that many viewers who aren’t extremely online or into the Oscars didn’t realize the show was starting earlier than usual.

Despite all that, the combination of big movies and a well-produced show that held viewers’ attention was enough to overcome whatever drag the time change might have had. Plus, the earlier start resulted in an earlier end time — which, in the long term, should eventually work out to be a net positive for ABC’s ratings since it means the show avoids the even bigger problem of viewers simply going to bed as it drones on. Indeed, this year, that upside helped offset the other two wrinkles in (start) time: The show’s final half-hour was its most watched, with 21.9 million viewers tuning in to see Al Pacino casually announce that Oppenheimer had won best picture.

The Oscars also gave a big boost to Abbott Elementary: A postshow episode drew 6.9 million same-day viewers, the biggest audience in that metric ever for the series. One downbeat note for the Oscars, however, is that the show’s numbers among adults under 50 (3.8 rating) actually ranked slightly below CBS’s Grammy broadcast last month (4.0).

Ratings for the Oscars have been on a (mostly) downward trajectory over the past decade thanks to across-the-board declines in viewership for linear television as well as the interruptions to live events caused by the pandemic. While the 2020 ceremony aired one month before the world shut down because of COVID, its audience of 23.6 million viewers actually represented what was then an all-time low for the ceremony and was down 20 percent from 2019’s nearly 30 million viewership. The first Oscars impacted by COVID came in 2021 when a dramatically stripped-down and delayed telecast saw ratings collapse to just 10 million. Numbers rebounded in 2022 (15.4 million), and last year, the show rose to 18.7 million.

Other awards shows of late have also been on something of a ratings roller coaster, though lately things have been trending up. CBS’s telecast of the Grammys last month drew 16.9 million viewers, up more than one-third from a year ago. And the Eye’s January telecast of the Golden Globes improved by roughly 50 percent year-to-year, drawing 10 million viewers. Yet a much-delayed January Emmys show, airing against a big NFL game, managed a meager 4.5 million viewers on Fox, setting another record low for the TV honors.