Lifetime’s original movie “Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B” delivered 3.2 million total viewers on Saturday night.
Starring Nickelodeon and VH1’s “Drumline a New Beat” star Alexandra Shipp, the movie also averaged 1.7 million viewers in the advertiser-coveted 18-49 demographic and 1.6 million viewers in the cable channel’s key demo 25-54 demo 1.3 million Women 18-49 viewers, according to preliminary numbers.
Among the Adults 18-49 and Women 18-49, “Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B” was the No. 2 movie telecast on cable, behind another Lifetime original movie, “Flowers in the Attic.”
As TheWrap previously reported, “Aaliyah” ranked No. 1 on Nielsen’s Twitter TV ratings for the most recent week, generating 997,000 tweets from 258,000 authors The TV movie scored more than 56 million impressions, with a unique audience of 3.4 million Twitter users. It beat both AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and “Scandal.”
Immediately following the movie at 10:00 p.m., the hour-long documentary “Beyond the Headlines: Aaliyah” was viewed by 2.7 million total viewers, 1.4 million in the advertiser demo and 1.3 million in the channel’s key demo.
Executive produced by daytime talk show host Wendy Williams, Howard Braunstein and Debra Martin Chase, the two-hour movie is based on Christopher John Farley’s bestselling book “Aaliyah: More Than a Woman.”
It charts Aaliyah’s life from the age of 10 when she appeared on “Star Search,” the path to her first album and R. Kelly, her meteoric rise and then to age 22 when she died in a plane crash in 2001.
Lifetime will encore “Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B” Monday at at 8 p.m.