Published 23 August 2024, 22:19 IST

The momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign helped push the ratings for the Democratic National Convention past the Republican festivities for former President Trump.

Nielsen data showed that Harris’ well-received acceptance speech was watched by 29 million viewers across 15 networks.

The figure is 14% higher than for Trump’s speech, which scored 25.4 million viewers July 19. Harris also drew substantially more than the 24.6 million viewers who watched Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the convention in 2020 and about the same as the 29.8 million viewers who tuned in to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Harris helped herself by keeping her speech to 37 minutes. Trump’s 90-minute-plus stem-winder went on well past midnight on the East Coast.

The speech caps a successful week for the Democratic National Convention, which topped the audience for the GOP’s gathering every night this week.

Harris being thrust to the top of the ticket after President Biden decided to end his reelection campaign on July 21 — one of the wildest political twists in U.S. history — has energized Democratic voters who were unhappy to have a rematch of the 2020 campaign.

Harris used the speech to reintroduce herself to the public, going heavy on biographical details and her work as a prosecutor in California.

Harris may have also gotten a boost from false rumors that music superstars Beyoncé and Taylor Swift were coming to the United Center in Chicago to perform at the event.

The rumblings — which tabloid news website TMZ reported as fact in the case of Beyoncé — were repeated by several network anchors.

The Harris campaign is likely to feel encouraged by how her speech outperformed Trump’s in a number of cities in the swing states where the election will be decided in the electoral college.

Harris averaged 50% more viewers than Trump in Philadelphia, 36% more in Detroit, 31% more in Raleigh, N.C., and 21% more in Atlanta, according to Nielsen.

Harris underperformed Trump by 10% in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was held.

MSNBC, the home team channel for liberal voters, saw its largest audience ever for a Democratic convention, averaging 6 million Thursday and 5.2 million viewers over four nights.

CNN was second for the week with 3.6 million viewers, followed by ABC (3.3 million), NBC (2.5 million), CBS (2.2 million) and Fox News (2.4 million).

MSNBC also had the most viewers in the 25-to-54 age group most coveted by advertisers, edging CNN by around 10,000 viewers in the category — a first.

CNN had won the demographic audience segment by much wider margins in 2016 and 2020.

Fox News, which injects conservative, pro-Trump commentary into its coverage, made a concerted effort to book more Democratic politicians this year — four times as many as it did in 2016. But the network has never been a first stop for the party’s conventions.

After Harris completed her speech, Trump called into Fox News to criticize it. Several times he pressed the keys on his phone as he ranted to anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

(Fox News was the most watched network for the Republican convention by a wide margin, averaging 6.6 million viewers over the four nights and 9.8 million viewers on the final session.)

Harris’ speech was probably watched by millions more people on streaming platforms.

Fox Corp.’s LiveNOW, an ad-supported free streaming site that presents raw news video without any commentary, peaked at 117,000 concurrent viewers Thursday, and 75,000 throughout the week with continuous convention coverage.

CNN does not reveal data for its live stream on parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max platform. But the network said the four days of the convention rank in the top 10 in daily usage since the service was launched last fall.

Film

The Killer
Director: John Woo
A Better Tomorrow Films and Atlas Entertainment
Streaming on Peacock: 08.23

In late 2023, I had the opportunity to chat with legendary director John Woo, who began his career in Hong Kong, went to Hollywood and changed the face of action filmmaking around the world. One of the key points we discussed was his own cinematic influences, as well as the many younger filmmakers who have been influenced by his work. The reason that I bring this up is because as I watched The Killer, the director’s English language reimagining of his 1989 Hong Kong classic, I couldn’t help but view it through this rather specific lens. 

Nathalie Emmanuel (Fast X, Game of Thrones) stars as Zee, a notorious assassin feared throughout the Parisian underworld and known as The Queen of the Dead. Zee is sent on a hit at a Paris night club by her boss and mentor, Finn (Sam Worthington, Avatar), with a strict understanding that no witnesses can remain alive. When a young singer, Jen (Diana Silvers, Space Force, Booksmart) is caught up in the melee, injured and blinded, Zee has a crisis of conscience and spares her life. This doesn’t go over well at all with Finn or his client, and after it’s made clear that the job will be finished with or without her, Zee goes to the hospital where Jen is set to be eliminated, rescues her and runs. Zee’s actions attract the attention of a sharp police investigator, Sey (Omar Sy, Jurassic World, Lupin), and Zee finds herself pursued by from all sides as she uncovers a dark criminal conspiracy and is forced to confront her own past.

The original version of The Killer was was designed to be Woo’s homage to the gangster films of Martin Scorsese, set in the Hong Kong underworld, and just as Woo was inspired by Scorsese, he has inspired other filmmakers. Woo makes more nods here to those directors who have come after than those before him. It’s hard to watch this intriguing new take on The Killer without spotting Woo’s obvious new homages to Quentin Tarantino (Zee fighting villains in a night club with a Samurai sword), The Wachowskis (lots of all black outfits, including sunglasses and trenchcoats), Steven Soderbergh (split screen sequences explaining careful planning of missions) and more. Above all else, in context, this new film is Woo taking charge of Hollywood’s longstanding desire to remake his film, doing it himself and turning it into less of a direct remake than a wistful look back at a career spanning over 50 years—an aging filmmaker’s way of metaphorically singing My Way. A sequence inside a church that creatively addresses Woo’s trademark use of doves and the original meaning of it, symbolizing spiritual peace and innocence, is surprisingly touching. It’s far more accurate to call it a reimaging of The Killer than a remake,  because apart from the basics of the plot set up, this film bares little resemblance to the original. In their new take on the premise, Woo and his screenwriters, Oscar winner Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential) and the team of Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken (10 Cloverfield Lane) have gone with a vastly different approach, giving it an international flavor and more of a spy movie feel—there’s at least as much of the John Woo who directed Mission: Impossible 2 on display here anything else—and they’ve made the title character a woman and significantly reduced the swaggering machismo factor, as well as addressed the problematic and somewhat condescending portrayal of the singer—the only significant female character in the 1989 version—as a naive and helpless waif. The significantly more complicated plot is convoluted and loses much of the simple appeal of the story, yet it’s not meant as a replacement for that film. In the context of acknowledging a Hollywood career that included Face/Off, there’s something about the added silliness of this version that only enhanced the fun for me. 

Emmanuel is  irresistibly charming as Zee, not even trying to fill the shoes of Chow Yun-fat and creating a new character who is hard underwritten yet more morally grounded and easy to get behind. Sy is likable as the police inspector, and the interplay between the two is quite stong. Silver gives a very satisfying performance as Jen, the one character that is hard to question as being superior to the original version. Worthington’s Irish accent is cringeworthy and cartoonish,  though his acting is solid enough, particularly in the context of such a gleefully over-the-top film, and Angeles Woo (John’s daughter) adds a fun presence as Chi Mai, another assassin. The film is packed with far too many characters to keep them all straight, though most of the cast does solid, if forgettable, work.

The Killer runs a bit long, and it’s certainly nothing particularly new, but it’s a fun guilty pleasure movie that I thoroughly enjoyed as a longtime Woo fan who took joy in seeing all of his distinctive signature elements packed into over big rollicking adventure. If you can turn off your brain and view the movie as what it is, rather than holding it to the same standards as an original than was quite groundbreaking for its time, it’s a lively and diverting ride. –Patrick Gibbs

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