Disney (and others) at the Box Office - Current State of Affairs

[BrianLo]

Interesting! Did they reply to you saying something? Is it possible she's just on vacation?

Yes, twice. The plagiarism concerns were my key area of focus, I wasn’t going to them with essentially grievances on data interpretation or articles lacking a central thesis.

I demonstrated in a few minutes how the most recent Paris articles self plagerized large passages from at least three different past articles (that I found after a few minutes of googling on my phone). Also that it plagerized another author from the Tribune. Most of her articles were similarly formed, eventually I left it on its in their court to see how badly it pervades the last several years.

 

[Agent H]

Yes, twice. The plagiarism concerns with the key area of focus, I wasn’t going to them with essentially grievances on data interpretation or articles lacking a central thesis.

I demonstrated in a few minutes how the most recent Paris articles self plagerized large passages from three different past articles that I found and actually plagerized another author from the tribute. Most of her articles were similarly formed.

Wow! Good on you for doing something about this. You have made the world a better place.

 

[LittleBuford]

Aside from that young Indian lady who accepted an award for someone (I can't remember who) and gave a short protest speech on the plight of the American Indian, which elicited boos from the celebrity audience, I can't think of any big political moments or themes during the 1970's shows. And then John Wayne got all upset about it, which fueled the stunt further.

I may have just forgotten, and I'm sure there was something besides the Indian lady, but the tone and shift was noticeable and rather off-putting in the 2010's. I don't remember the 70's Oscars being that way year after year, much less the 80's or 90's.

This might jog your memory:

Politics and Oscar Night

 

[LittleBuford]

Another link for anyone interested:

Revisiting an Oscar Night Controversy — in 1975

By 1967, the commercial and political impact on Hollywood of the sixties counterculture had become impossible to ignore. The studios were in bad shape, still contending with a generation-long box office slump and struggling to get young people into the habit of going to the movies. Film historian J

www.ucpress.edu

 

[brideck]

Another link for anyone interested:

Revisiting an Oscar Night Controversy — in 1975

By 1967, the commercial and political impact on Hollywood of the sixties counterculture had become impossible to ignore. The studios were in bad shape, still contending with a generation-long box office slump and struggling to get young people into the habit of going to the movies. Film historian J

www.ucpress.edu

Crazy. I swear I'd never heard about any of it before either... was just picking the Oscars from 50 years ago because it was a nice, round number.

 

[LittleBuford]

Crazy. I swear I'd never heard about any of it before either... was just picking the Oscars from 50 years ago because it was a nice, round number.

It certainly helps to put things in perspective.

 

[TP2000]

I mean even you have to look beyond just yourself and note that if you are having to plug it into your internet router and not directly your TV that they are looking beyond just TV devices and rather ALL devices that consume media.

I'm infamously self-absorbed, thus why I'm a lifelong confirmed bachelor. So I rarely look beyond myself. But even if Mr. Nielsen is tracking all of my Internet traffic, he won't find anything being watched on a telephone or iPad in my home.

The trend though sort of reset post-Covid, just like it did for the box office. So we have the pre-Covid trend and the post-Covid trend. And for the post-Covid trend its going UP UP UP, not down.

It'll be interesting to see if this trend continues next year and where that new median viewership is going to be, I suspect somewhere in the mid-20s but we'll see.

Let's not wait that long. Like the Plymouth dealer's used to say.... Suddenly It's 1960 2026! Here's that chart early.

 

[TP2000]

Crazy. I swear I'd never heard about any of it before either... was just picking the Oscars from 50 years ago because it was a nice, round number.

When I first mentioned Oscar's viewership in '75 I had actually wanted to start in the 60's, especially the first year they were in color in 1966. But apparently Nielsen didn't start to track Oscar's viewership until 1974, so the info on the televised period from 1953 to 1973 is murky, save for a faux Indian maiden being hustled past a furious John Wayne backstage.

So I just started at 1975, a year after Nielsen tracking began for the show, because it was exactly 50 years ago. Seems a good a point to start as anything, if you want to be able to use some basic facts and data. I don't know if '75 was a big year or a dud year for Oscar's viewership, as it does wax and wane depending on the popular movies of the day. But it seemed a good solid year, 50 years past, to start the conversation.

I have absolutely no idea how they tracked or reported radio listenership in the 40's and 50's, when the nationwide listenership for the 1946 Oscar's broadcast was pegged at 50 Million, or roughly 35% of the US population at that time.

 

[LittleBuford]

Something else that militates against the argument that political bias is the reason for the downturn in Oscars viewership is the fact that the numbers have dropped far more than would be the case if only one “side” were switching off. It’s clear that viewers across the ideological spectrum aren’t tuning in at the rate that they used to. Anecdotal, I know, but my own (very liberal) partner has stopped watching the Oscars in recent years (I myself have never watched them).

 

[TP2000]

As a fun point of reference for how low into irrelevance the Oscar's has fallen...

35% of Americans listened to the live nationwide radio broadcast in 1946.

35% of Americans in 2025 would be 119 Million people watching the TV broadcast today.

Instead, 19.7 Million people, or just 17% of 119 Million, watched the broadcast this past Sunday. And apparently, a Million of those were kids grounded in their room watching via their iPhone under the covers instead of doing their homework. Who knew?!?

 

[TP2000]

Something else that militates against the argument that political bias is the reason for the downturn in Oscars viewership is the fact that the numbers have dropped far more than would be the case if only one “side” were switching off. It’s clear that viewers across the ideological spectrum aren’t tuning in at the rate that they used to. Anecdotal, I know, but my own (very liberal) partner has stopped watching the Oscars in recent years (I myself have never watched them).

Why did he stop watching? And, pardon the age question, but is he old enough to remember the epic Oscar's Viewing Parties of the 1970's-2000's? They were simply fabulous. And routinely sinful. And very memorable.

Aside from suddenly getting annoyingly openly and unabashedly political, to the point that it was just offensive and blatantly elitist to the paying audience, how do you explain this type of drop off in just the past 10 years?

 

[LittleBuford]

Why did he stop watching?

I don’t know. He just lost interest in the ceremony, though he still follows the results. It certainly has nothing to do with politics for him.

Aside from suddenly getting annoyingly openly and unabashedly political, to the point that it was just offensive and blatantly elitist to the paying audience, how do you explain this type of drop off in just the past 10 years?

View attachment 847198

I don’t know how to explain it; the reasons seem multiple and complex to me. I’m just wary of a narrative that ties it all to (anti-conservative) political messaging yet doesn’t account for why liberals too have switched off in droves.

 

[Ghost93]

What's interesting is that it wasn't always that way. In the 90s, for instance, you've got popular movies like Dances with Wolves, Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump, and Titanic winning Best Picture. Schindler's List, Braveheart, and Unforgiven also did well at the box office.

I think that has shifted in the years since, with less popular movies winning more frequently now. I'm sure there are many factors that go into the change.

I think the real shift started happening around 2009 when Avatar — the biggest movie of the year — lost to The Hurt Locker, which was at the time the lowest grossing Best Picture winner. I'm not saying Avatar necessarily deserved to win (Inglorious Basterds would have been my pick for that year), but I think the Hurt Locker winning showed the Academy moving away from the buzziest film of the year towards smaller, critically acclaimed years.

The shift became more pronounced in 2016 when a crowdpleaser and old-school musical like La La Land lost to Moonlight, which is a great movie — but very arthouse and not likely to be enjoyed as much by mainstream moviegoers.

 

[TP2000]

I don’t know. He just lost interest in the ceremony, though he still follows the results. It certainly has nothing to do with politics for him.

Oh. Well, I can understand that. I lost interest too, once the parties died out. It was always such a decadent and silly night. But now it just seems... off-putting. And I agree that some of that transcends politics.

Perhaps because I know someone (long story) who tells me how many Millions of dollars and battalions of staffers and "little people" go into the simple act of getting a 42 year old actress still trying to pull off 31 down the red carpet on the first Sunday in March. It's an entire industry just for that one day. It's sort of icky. And very decadent and wasteful.

I don’t know how to explain it; the reasons seem multiple and complex to me. I’m just wary of a narrative that ties it all to (anti-conservative) political messaging yet doesn’t account for why liberals too have switched off in droves.

Again, I get that. The political messaging doesn't explain all of the huge drop in viewership in the past 10 years, it simply is a part of it. There's something else going on that turns folks off from both sides of the political spectrum.

But I was a bit shocked to learn ABC (Disney!) was shelling out $100 Million per year in an 8 year contract from 2020 thru 2028 that was pre-signed back in 2016. That's $800 Million they spent on a show that has seen its ratings collapse just around the time the new contract kicked in. That's gotta hurt, and no wonder why Disney failed to sign on for another contract extension this year when they still had the rights to it.

Burbank clearly sees where this once premiere annual experience is going now.

I wonder where the Oscars goes once ABC bows out in '28? On to Bravo or Hallmark or a streamer? And what does that do to the show itself? Not to mention the battalions of workers who are paid huge bucks for three months of work to get a 42 year old actress down the red carpet on the first Sunday in March?

The times they are a changin'.

 

[Disney Irish]

I'm infamously self-absorbed, thus why I'm a lifelong confirmed bachelor. So I rarely look beyond myself. But even if Mr. Nielsen is tracking all of my Internet traffic, he won't find anything being watched on a telephone or iPad in my home.

Well maybe look beyond yourself and realize it doesn't matter if YOU won't be watching on those devices in YOUR house, but rather that the Nielsen device is made to track more than just TV viewership.

Let's not wait that long. Like the Plymouth dealer's used to say.... Suddenly It's 1960 2026! Here's that chart early.

View attachment 847197

And maybe it will be at those levels, the point is and continues to be that the trend is going back up again with year-over-year gains for the last 4 years. So forget pre-pandemic levels and consider 2021 a reset, just like we do with the box office, and just start tracking post-pandemic levels. It may never get back to pre-pandemic levels, again just like the box office, but it can find a new median in this new trend.

 

[doctornick]

Something else that militates against the argument that political bias is the reason for the downturn in Oscars viewership is the fact that the numbers have dropped far more than would be the case if only one “side” were switching off. It’s clear that viewers across the ideological spectrum aren’t tuning in at the rate that they used to. Anecdotal, I know, but my own (very liberal) partner has stopped watching the Oscars in recent years (I myself have never watched them).

I don’t really harbor a strong opinion about this, but I can say that politics popping up places turns me off to wanting to watch that thing even when I fully agreed with the politics being displayed. If “politics” is the problem I can certainly see it affecting people of all persuasions just trying to escape that kind of talk.

 

[easyrowrdw]

Anyway, there's a pretty decent correlation (R^2 = .6566) between number of movie tickets sold and viewership of the following year's Oscars (using data back to 1995), which makes pretty good sense to me. If people come back to the theaters more and more, then these ratings should go up correspondingly.

That's really interesting and you’re actually underselling it! An r-squared value of 0.6566 is a correlation (r) of 0.81, which is very strong. R^2 of 0.6566 means ticket sales account for about 66% of the variability in Oscar rating. That's a lot.

 

[LittleBuford]

I don’t really harbor a strong opinion about this, but I can say that politics popping up places turns me off to wanting to watch that thing even when I fully agreed with the politics being displayed. If “politics” is the problem I can certainly see it affecting people of all persuasions just trying to escape that kind of talk.

This is fair, though it doesn't really reflect how the argument is usually framed (as one side alienating the other), nor does it address why the presence of political content seems not to have hurt viewership figures before the last decade or so.

 

[DKampy]

This is fair, though it doesn't really reflect how the argument is usually framed (as one side alienating the other), nor does it address why the presence of political content seems not to have hurt viewership figures before the last decade or so.

Yes… it is very one sided… including our Martini loving dog who says politics should stay away from late night talk shows… but watches Gutfeld)the most unfunny person I have ever witnessed IMO)every night on Fox by his own admission

 

[easyrowrdw]

Her purported Native ancestry has been disputed by multiple family members. Mary Louise Cruz.

Supposedly John Wayne was waiting in the wings and six men had to stop him from forcing her off stage.

As it turns out, the John Wayne story is mostly likely a myth. The original article from film critic Farran Smith Nehme is quite long, but here's an overview from the LA Times.