Category: AUDIENCE

The key problem for the Oscars is not, as Hollywood’s critics on the right sometimes suggest, that the movie industry’s liberal politics are dragging down both box office numbers and Oscar ratings — that the desire to preach is swamping the desire to entertain. There is a political problem, but it is secondary: The key issue for the academy is that the Hollywood system no longer produces enough of the kind of movies that a mass-audience awards spectacle requires.

Netflix says 70 percent of its streams end up on connected TVs instead of phones, tablets or PCs. That number isn’t a shock — Netflix has been clear about the importance of TVs for a long time, and it’s why the company has spent a lot of energy working out integration deals with pay TV distributors like Comcast and Sky — but it’s a good reminder that not everything is moving to the phone.

First of all, argues Stuart Heritage, nobody, not even a poor old TV critic, can watch anything close to that much. Second, “Netflix is gaining a reputation as a provider that throws buckets of money at stuff nobody else wants. … Third, if this isn’t an unsustainable land-grab, I don’t know what is.”

The live show was broadcast by ABC and it attracted an average of 26.5 million viewers according to Nielsen, a 20 percent decline on last year’s 32.9 million. The previous record low was set in 2008 when 31.8 million viewers tuned in to watch Jon Stewart host the event. That year, Oscar chaos was narrowly avoided after an 11-week writers’ strike in Hollywood.

Women accounted for 52 percent of moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada in 2016, according to the most recent annual study by the Motion Picture Association of America. But on the internet, and on ratings sites, they’re a much smaller percentage.

Whereas before Disney may have been the studio making more money at the box office than everyone else, they may end up as the only studio making anymoney at the box office. And that, in turn, will cause trickle-down effects throughout the industry. All the way down to movie theaters, many of which will have to close as a result. Looking forward from this point, I think the big movie theater chains are in trouble. They’ve known this for a while, which is why there has been so much consolidation. But whereas before, it seemed like it would be a long, drawn out death, I now believe we’re nearing this finale sooner than many thought.