Following CODA‘s Best Picture win at the Academy Awards on Sunday night, the feature film tripled its viewership and drew a slew of new customers to the Apple TV+ streaming platform according to Deadline. The trade reports that CODA viewership rose 300% compared to its metrics last week and became the #1 “most watched program on Apple TV+,” while also “drawing 25% new viewers” to the platform. Following its success at the end of this year’s award season Apple TV+ has announced that the movie will be returning to theaters and will be back on over 600 screens starting this weekend.
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CODA was nominated for just three awards on Sunday night, the fewest in eight decades for a Best Picture winner, but took all of them home. In addition to the top prize, CODA also won Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role for Troy Kotsur and Best Adapted Screenplay for writer/director Sian Heder. Kotsur, a deaf actor, has been active in the theater since the 1980s with only a few credits on the big screen and in television to his name (one of them being in The Mandalorian season two where he played a Tusken Raider and helped develop the use of sign language in the Star Wars franchise).
“It’s really amazing that our film, CODA, has reached out worldwide,” Kotsur said via ASL in his acceptance speech. “It even reached all the way to the White House, and they invited the cast of CODA to visit and have a tour of the White House, and we met President Joe and Dr. Jill, and I was planning on teaching them some dirty sign language, but Marlee Matlin told me to behave myself.So don’t worry, Marlee, I won’t drop any F-bombs in my speech today.Instead I want to thank all of the deaf theater stages where I was allowed and given the opportunity to develop my craft as an actor.”
For those unaware of the film’s plot, Apple TV+ describes it as follows: “Seventeen-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the sole hearing member of a deaf family – a CODA, child of deaf adults. Her life revolves around acting as interpreter for her parents (Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur) and working on the family’s struggling fishing boat every day before school with her father and older brother (Daniel Durant). But when Ruby joins her high school’s choir club, she discovers a gift for singing and soon finds herself drawn to her duet partner Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). Encouraged by her enthusiastic, tough-love choirmaster (Eugenio Derbez) to apply to a prestigious music school, Ruby finds herself torn between the obligations she feels to her family and the pursuit of her own dreams.”
