It wasn’t a great morning for the Weinstein Company, which saw both of its major candidates rejected by the Directors Guild of America in that organization’s nominations, the last to be announced before Thursday morning’s Oscar unveilings.  The DGA chose: Ben Affleck, ARGO Kathryn Bigelow, ZERO DARK THIRTY Tom Hooper, LES MISERABLES Ang Lee, […]

Last night was dominated by ESPN, whose airing of the BCS CHAMPIONSHIP GAME may beat all the broadcast networks combined, despite a number that trailed off as Alabama’s irreversible destruction of Notre Dame became clear.  18-49 numbers aren’t yet available, but early household ratings indicate the game could be up 10% from 2012, when it […]

NBC’s Deception premiered to a 2.0 adult 18-49 rating in the fast nationals last night (very close to our 1.9 rating forecast).  Look for the series to go down a few tenths from here in the next few weeks.  Biggest Loser (2.4 rating from 8-10 pm) beat our 2.1 rating forecast and is off to a solid start. […]

This past sports weekend was all about the Wild Card playoffs: four games arranged by the NFL in ascending order of audience appeal.  Sure enough, as the weekend progressed, the ratings steadily increased with each passing game.  The first game between the Bengals and Texans Saturday at 4:30 (16.2 HH rating in the 56 large markets with […]

  DOWNTON ABBEY returned to PBS in spectacular fashion last night, with an enormous 5.1 household rating.  That was almost double the rating for Season 2’s premiere (almost 50% higher than the Season 2 finale, which was itself up 25% from Season 1), and its 7.9M total audience outrated everything on network TV in the […]

NBC began the second half of its season, but the story was still football. FOX:  The overrun from the Seattle/Washington NFL WILD CARD GAME coverage, which was cunningly pushed even farther into primetime by FOX with the postgame show extended to around 8:03PM, gave Rupert Murdoch’s troops the night.  The overrun itself had a massive […]

THE WEEK.  For the recently completed week ending Sunday (December 31, 2012-January 6, 2013), NBC maintained first place with a preliminary 2.75 adult 18-49 rating in prime time.  The week was supported by NBC’s final NFL game of the season (an NFL Wild Card game on Saturday night, which should go up to a 10.6 rating).  But […]

Updated international box office chart below.  The Hobbit (+$97 million overseas since last week) and Life of Pi (+$82 million) are the big movers this week. New entrants to the chart include The Impossible at #31, Texas Chainsaw at #41, and Promised Land at #65.  With significant (and growing overseas business) the Spanish-produced Impossible is the one film in this week’s crop that can move up […]