Viewership for Friday's Opening Ceremony was a dismal 16 million, as NBC faces what Yahoo!sports' Dan Wetzel called a "cataclysmic loss" of audience - a record low exceeding the previous record of 20.1 million viewers for 1988's Calgary games. It was 43% below the 2018 games' opening ceremony in South Korea which had 28.3 million viewers.

It comes on the heels of Thursday's ratings disaster that saw just 7.7 million people tune in, dramatically below same-night audiences of 2018 (16 million) and 2014 from Russia (20.02 million).

NBC said the 16 million is a "total audience delivery" and includes all of its networks and streaming. The television-only average audience was below 14 million for the day, per the preliminary data released by the network. -Yahoo!

As Deadline noted, just "8.7 million tuned in on NBC in primetime [to] see the pre-taped Mike Tirico and Savannah Guthrie-led coverage of the propaganda-heavy spectacle put on by Chinese President Xi Jinping and filmmaker Zhang Yimou."

The Opening Ceremony was so boring that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to 'rest his eyes' during the Ukrainian team's entrance.