During the first three full days of the 2024 Paris Olympics, NBCU scored an average of 34.5 million viewers across television networks and digital platforms.
These viewership numbers came after 28.6 million viewers tuned into Friday night’s opening ceremony that drew sharp criticism for featuring drag queens in a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
Organizers of the Paris Olympics apologized to outraged viewers who were offended by a scantily clad blue man singing while wearing a headdress of fruit alongside an ample woman playing the role of Jesus and drag queen dancers as the disciples.
“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group,” Olympics spokeswoman Anne Descamps told reporters in a press conference on Sunday. “If people have taken any offense we are, of course, really, really sorry.”
The performance was reportedly meant to depict Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, and an assembly of Greek gods on Mount Olympus for a banquet in the painting The Feast of the Gods by Dutch artist Jan Harmensz van Biljert.
However, calls for “Boycott Olympics” spread when viewers saw what many deemed to be an offensive religious depiction. Thousands of social media users used the hashtag #boycottOlympics that began trending on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Actress Candace Cameron Bure, fitness personality Jillian Michaels, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, tech billionaire Elon Musk, and comedian Rob Schneider called the opening performance disgusting and disrespectful.
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Despite protests on social media, the first three days of the Paris Olympics viewership was up 79 percent from that of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, according to ratings data. The telecasts on Saturday drew an audience of 32.4 million, and on Sunday, the audience grew even larger to 41.5 million people.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max saw record setting viewership in Europe with almost 1 billion streaming minutes across the continent.
