Oscars get audience bump from ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer,’ but ratings aren’t quite a blockbuster

Barbenheimer boosts Oscars ratings with 19.5 million viewers, but still falls short of pre-pandemic numbers.

Barbenheimer brought a bump not a boom to Oscars ratings. An estimated 19.5 million people watched Sunday night’s 96th Academy Awards ceremony on ABC. That’s the biggest number drawn by the telecast in four years.

But that upward trend comes from an all-time low during the pandemic, and is up just 4% from last year’s estimated audience of 18.7 million, according to numbers released Monday by ABC.

The Academy experimented with scheduling this year’s show an hour earlier, and for the first time in years had many nominations for huge hit movies that viewers had actually seen — Barbie and Oppenheimer.

The viewership peaked in the final half hour, when the audience saw Ryan Gosling perform “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie, saw Cillian Murphy win best actor, Christopher Nolan win best director for Oppenheimer and Al Pacino give the film the best picture Oscar in an odd presentation.

A major star, Emma Stone, also won best actress in the final stretch in the night’s most competitive race over Lily Gladstone, and nearly 22 million people saw her do it.

The show actually started a little less than an hour early. With Gaza protests happening outside slowing down entrances at the Dolby Theatre, host Jimmy Kimmel kicked things off about six minutes late, but it’s not clear if that affected viewership.

Last year’s big Oscar winner, Everything, Everywhere All at Once, was hardly a slouch at the box office, bringing in $143 million globally. But that’s nothing like the Barbenheimer juggernaut, with Oppenheimer approaching a billion global dollars and Barbie surpassing it.