Can Sunday’s Oscars equal(ize) the TV audience of Super Bowl Sunday’s “The Equalizer” debut on CBS? Probably not, especially given the way things are going for the major awards shows amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Back on Feb. 7, immediately following the Super Bowl postgame show, Queen Latifah’s “The Equalizer” debuted to 20.460 million total viewers. See how the remake ranked among all post-Super Bowl shows here.
Super Bowl LV itself scored 96.4 million total viewers, the big game’s smallest tally since 2007. Who said Tom Brady vs. Patrick Mahomes was a ratings slam dunk? (OK, so that’s a cross-sport pun, but extra points are no longer as much of a gimme as they used to be.)
Last year’s Oscars drew 23.6 million total viewers on ABC, down 6 million TV viewers — a whopping 20% — from 2019’s telecast. That was an all-time low, and the 2020 live celebration of film happened before COVID-19 interfered with U.S. telecasts — or the traditional release of movies in theaters. It was also 100,000 viewers shy of the 2020 post-Super Bowl telecast, the Season 3 premiere of Fox’s “Masked Singer.”
Mass theater closures since last March means far less awareness of — and buzz for — this year’s nominees. You can lock in the record low status for Sunday now, but even a relatively low-rated Oscars will still be big money for ABC.
The ratings decline has also coincided with the Academy producers’ decision not to hire a host for the telecast for the last two years — a gambit that Steven Soderbergh and this year’s other Oscar producers are also adopting this Sunday. While the novelty worked OK in 2019, last year’s hostless edition performed dreadfully.
While ABC still managed to sell out its full ad slate for this year’s Oscars, the show’s traditional status as the top-rated non-sports entertainment show of the year is seriously threatened — especially if viewership sinks beneath that “Equalizer” debut.
This could be the third year in the last four that the Oscars have gotten fewer eyeballs that whatever show aired just after the Super Bowl — the awards show has typically dominated the competition even in that coveted post-Super Bowl slot. In 2019, the Oscars drew 29.6 million total viewers while James Corden’s post-game talent show “The World’s Best” bowed on CBS to 22.2 million total viewers (and got canceled after a single season).
The trend seemed to begin in 2018, when NBC’s “This Is Us” earned 27 million total viewers, edging out the Academy Awards’ sum of 26.5 million total TV viewers.
ABC and the Academy are bracing for a ratings decline — which would be consistent with other awards shows both in recent years and especially since the onset of the pandemic. Last month’s 63rd annual Grammy Awards on CBS shed 10 million viewers from the 2020 version. Just 8.8 million viewers tuned in across multiple platforms, down by a full 10 million viewers (-53%) from a year ago. Two weeks prior, NBC’s 2021 Golden Globes shed 63% of total viewers from 2020, plummeting from 18.4 million overall TV viewers to a mere 6.9 million.
Last September, the 72nd Emmy Awards on ABC drew 6.1 million total viewers, down 12% to a new all-time low in its own right. The Emmys are traditionally the smallest of the four majors, not in small part due to their outside-of-awards-season timing.
On average, those shows declined 43%. If Sunday’s Oscars decline by even half of that, it’ll be a comfortable win for “The Equalizer.”
The 93rd Academy Awards air Sunday starting at 8/7c on ABC.
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