Right now, it really bites to be Essential Quality and the 93rd Academy Awards.
Things are gloomy for the former because the odds-on favorite to win this year’s Kentucky Derby finished fourth in Saturday’s 147th running. As for the latter, after crashing to an all-time viewership low of 10.4 million for its April 25 show, the Oscars are now being repeatedly trampled in comparison to events that previously barely nipped at the heels of Hollywood’s biggest night.
On April 29, it was the first day of the NFL Draft that topped the Oscars. Now, it’s Saturday’s Kentucky Derby on NBC that took the crown. As Medina Spirit won at a socially distanced Churchill Downs, the Comcast-owned network’s evening broadcast of the fabled race snagged an audience of 14.4 million.
In a year of declining and dead letter office awards shows and small screen viewing overall, the 2021 Kentucky Derby was up a stellar 53% in viewers compared with the 2020 Kentucky Derby. While no Super Bowl (96.4 million for the February 7 game, a multi-decade low), Saturday’s Derby was up 38% in sets of eyeballs from the Oscars and 15.2% from the ABC-ESPN- NFL Network airing of day one of the NFL Draft.
That’s an all-time first for the Derby to beat the Academy Awards, which usually are viewed by 20 million or more.
Compared with the drama deep and Country House winning 2019’s race, the 2021 Derby was down about 12% in viewers — kind of a sports average this year versus pre-pandemic results. In fact, the 2021 Kentucky Derby is pretty much on par with the 15 million that tuned for the race on May 5, 2018.
read more here: https://deadline.com/2021/05/kentucky-derby-viewership-tops-oscars-nbc-medina-spirit-bob-baffert-1234749718/
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