The final Oscars viewing figures for 2025 are in, and it turns out about the same number of people watched as last year.
Report’s of the Oscars’ death have been greatly exaggerated.
Nielsen has updated its post-Oscars viewing figures, presumably as some kind of revenge against entertainment journalism’s headline writers. While initial estimates reported a 7% drop in the ceremony’s TV audience compared to the previous year’s 19.5m, the figure has since been revised to 19.7m – a 1% increase (ish). Cinema is saved!
According to ABC (via Variety), the discrepancy comes from “a significant portion of younger viewers tuning in via mobile devices and personal computers, which were not represented in Nielsen’s fast national data”.
This makes the 2025 ceremony the most-watched Oscars since 2019, when 23.64m people tuned in to see Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite win Best Picture (other awards are available). Bong has a new film out this weekend, incidentally – Mickey 17 – and we thought it was rather good.
The good news doesn’t stop there for ABC. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show was a real hit (relatively speaking) with younger audiences, with 2.8m viewers aged 18-34 demonstrating a 28% improvement on the previous year’s figures.
That’s a welcome boon for an Academy under fire in certain quarters for celebrating smaller films than previous years. Best Picture winner Anora – the NEON-distributed independent drama from indie darling Sean Baker – ranks among the lowest-grossing Oscar champs of the last 25 years, only slightly higher than the pandemic/straight-to-streaming-struck Nomadland and CODA, released in 2021 and 2020 respectively.
It also comes a year after Best Picture went to the $974m-grossing Oppenheimer – the Academy’s highest-earning winner since Return Of The King's victory in 2004.
While analysis of the fast national figures suggested post-Barbenheimer whiplash was behind the drop, it seems the combination of Conan O’Brien as host, performances from Wicked stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande and a much closer (and more eventful) awards race than previous years may have helped fuel a significant jump in interest amongst younger viewers.
Still, the new figures do little to reverse the steep decline in viewership the Oscars has been facing since the advent of social media. Though more than 57m Americans saw Titanic sweep the awards in 1998, it now seems that interest in the live broadcast has settled around the 20m mark (probably because everyone’s phone pings them the interesting results in real-time without forcing them to sit through Adrien Brody making a speech, but what do I know).
