EXCLUSIVE: Barbie may have beat her late-summer rival, Oppenheimer, at the box office but in a face-off in homes, the man in the soft-brimmed hat wins — as far as premiere weekends go.
Samba TV, which measures viewership from 3M opted-in Smart TVs for at least five-minutes, reports that the Live+5D window for the Universal title on VOD drew 388K, U.S. households, versus Barbie‘s which pulled 363K on her opening weekend on VOD in-homes back in September.
Oppenheimer hit VOD on Nov. 21 at the price of $19.99 to buy, while Warner Bros’ Barbie dropped on Sept. 12 at a purchase price of $29.99 and rental of $24.99.
SambaTV also reports that “Millennials over-indexed based on viewership of Oppenheimer (VOD) during the L+5D window, with the A25-34 group over-indexing by 15% and the A35-44 group over-indexing by 11%.”
In its first weekend, Oppenheimer‘s biggest age demo were the 18-24 bunch at 32%, followed by 24-34 (28%), those over 55 (14%) and 35-44 (13%). The Christopher Nolan directed biopic opened to $82.4M domestic, $180M worldwide over July 21-23 –mindblowing for a three-hour drama–, second behind Barbie which saw a bow of $162M domestic, $356.3M WW. It was the first time in domestic box office history that two movies opened to north of $80M. Barbie is the highest grossing movie of the year and Warner Bros’ best in the studio’s history with $1.44 billion worldwide, while Oppenheimer is third globally YTD with $950.2M. Both movies are being pushed this awards season in all categories.
Samba TV gathers viewership data via its proprietary content recognition technology on those Smart TV’s that opt in through partnerships with leading cable television providers and their affiliates. The analytics corp’s insights are built on a comprehensive source of real-time viewership data across broadcast, cable, over-the-top, and digital media. As is standard industry practice, the company analyzes its large proprietary dataset to project household-level TV viewership. They do not estimate viewership on non-TV devices, nor do they estimate co-viewing (number of people watching). For example, if someone watches Disney Plus via a mobile or web browser and casts that to their Smart TV, then their content recognition technology would capture that.
Once again these viewership figures are not from Universal or Warner Bros, rather independently from Samba TV.