HD Ratings: Lord of the Rings Rules
October 4, 2022 
2 Comments
Twenty years on, you might have thought the original Lord of the Rings movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, had done its dash as a primetime drawcard.
But its umpteenth free-to-air re-run on Saturday largely won its sprawling time slot in the core commercial demographics.
It averaged 1.7% of 25-54 year-olds and 1.3% of 18-49s.
The first hour lost to TVNZ 1’s Tipping Point: Lucky Stars (2.5%/1.8%) and Three’s double-ep wrap-up Building the Kiwi Dream (3.2%/2.0%).
But thereafter it dominated. TVNZ 1’s Gino’s Italian Family Adventure could muster only 1.4%/ 1.0%, Grand Designs Revisited 1.2%/0.7% and Showtrial 0.4%/0.2%.
Three’s Bay Patrol averaged 1.6%/1.1% and its movie, Get a Job, 0.4%/0.2%.
Duke’s movie Outbreak won post-10.00 with 0.6%/0.7% while TVNZ 1’s Social Media Murders averaged a competitive 0.5%/0.4%.
After several weeks of inconsistent Friday night ratings, TVNZ 1 bounced back with The Repair Shop (3.7%/2.6%) and The Dog House (3.6%/2.6%) easily winning their slots.
TVNZ 2’s Travel Guides Australia and Have You Been Paying Attention? narrowly led Three’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
Note: These overnight ratings exclude viewership of the networks’ +1 SD channels.
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October 8, 2022 at 8:07 pm
In typical broadcast TV fashion, Fellowship was in the wrong aspect ratio, Two Towers is correct, who knows how Return will be shown ?
In my experience, thx1138, broadcasters are at the mercy of what distributors supply. And often these broadcasts are tied into contracts for masters done years earlier. So it may have been that when TVNZ first licensed Fellowship, only the 16:9 standard was available. Since then, there’s been more of a move, thanks to streaming services pioneering viewer acceptance of ‘black bars’ on their unique aspect ratios, towards native ARs. Only way to counteract this is for network movie programmers to be more vigilant about the tech specs of the titles they contract.