As the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences begins final preparations for the 97th Academy Awards, the Media C-Suite presents its annual review of the values, and value, of the Oscars.
In Part I of the Oscars Gold series, we looked at the Academy itself as a value investment within the context of today’s US$3 trillion in global revenues to the Media & Entertainment industry.
Part II
The value generated by the Academy highlights the origins of Hollywood as a creative, technical and commercial collective enterprise with a business model based squarely in cinema and public perception of the “movies”. This legacy of “Hollywood”, and the Academy’s association with it, offers a distinct moment of reflection on new audiences and formats that often label Hollywood as the defining example of “legacy” media.
As growing audiences, and media markets, continue to pursue content that is produced internationally, distributed digitally and consumed on phones, the Academy is doubling down on its mission to promote the art and science of film-making as both economic and cultural connection.
So don’t count Hollywood out just yet.
Adding Up the Oscars
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has grown from 36 founding members in LA into a collective army of film-makers numbering more than 10,000 globally.
For nearly a century, the Academy has quietly evolved in lock-step with the emergence of television, the internet and now artificial intelligence, to promote the motion picture as a cornerstone of the global Media & Entertainment industry, with the box office as its point of reference. In doing so, the Academy itself has amassed an impressive war chest with total assets of US$1.36 billion earned not from the box office receipts of its members’ creative product (per se), but from the rights to distribute its annual Academy Awards ceremony on television.
Few other global cultural events have attracted more attention, and thus money, than the Academy’s annual Oscar’s ceremony.
In the leadup to the 97th annual Academy Awards, let’s take a brief look at several figures behind broadcasting the Oscars to a global audience and the effort to be this years’ featured attraction.
US$1,037,887,000 (Tax Free)
Although not shouting it from the rooftops, the Walt Disney Company, through ABC and Buena Vista International, pays the Academy a combination of license fees and royalties (derived from advertising revenues) to broadcast the Oscars to the world. The Academy reports revenues from these performance obligations in its audited Consolidated Financial Statements (as of end of June each year) as US$124.6 million in 2022, US$129.1 million in 2023 and a projected US$133.1 million last year.
In total, Disney is obligated to pay the US tax-exempt Academy not less than US$1 billion between 2021 and 2028, the year its broadcast licences through ABC and Buena Vista expire. That year, 2028, will also mark the 100th anniversary of the Oscars.
1 Billion Television Viewers
The Academy itself once boasted over 1 billion international viewers.
The billion viewer audience claim originates in an Associated Press article from 1985 in which AP Journalist Richard De Atley wrote that the 57th Academy Awards would be broadcast “live or on tape to an estimated audience of 1 billion in 77 countries, including first-time viewers in China and Poland.”
See this article by Daniel Radosh for The New Yorker entitled, One Billion.
Many at the Academy might say that billion view audience figure is just common knowledge.
“They keep reminding you, like every two seconds,” multi-award-winner Cate Blanchett once complained to Oprah Winfrey.
Airing annually to television audiences since 1953, this live, US “prime time” event officially captured the attention of over 55 million people at its viewership height in 1998, according to rating agency figures, nearly 20% of the US population at the time.
The American audience for the 96th Academy Awards was an average of 21 million, up from 19.5 million in 2023, according to Variety.
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Thomas is our founder, acting Publisher and contributes an outsized proportion of our articles and editorial pieces.
He is an American lawyer & private equity specialist with 30+ years of international experience in investment strategy. He has lived and worked in London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Nicosia as both adviser and executive to several of the world’s largest family offices, institutional investors and State-investment companies. He is also founder of Coherent Media Group, a corporate holding company dedicated to media & entertainment businesses globally.
In his spare time, Thomas is a corporate and political speech-writer and has ghost-written numerous Op-Eds, political/espionage thrillers and science fiction novels.
