Screen Actors Guild 2018 TV Awards Betting Odds

–The 2018 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards will take place on Sunday, January 21, 2018

–2018 will be the 24rd Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards Awards

–The award winners in both film and TV are selected by a vote of the full membership of The Screen Actors Guild

We’re heading into award season–at least we will be after the first of the year. For now, the entertainment industry is on hiatus until after the first of the year as is pretty much every other industry–including the media. So not only is there very little to set odds on in the non-sport milieu there’s not any interest in the media to have me on to talk about them. Anyway, it gives me a chance to get a jump on the seemingly endless array of ‘precursor’ awards in advance of the Academy Awards. Check out this schedule–I don’t know if I’ll do odds on *all* of the precursor awards but I’ll definitely try. It’s basically non-stop from the first of the year through the Oscars on March 4.

Since I covered the odds on the SAG film awards yesterday–properly called the ‘Theatrical Motion Picture’ awards per the press release–I’ll move on to the TV Awards.

THE FUTURE OF TV AND MOVIES IN THE DIGITAL WORLD

These are strange days for both the TV and film industry. At one point, the TV actors were clearly ‘second class citizens’ to their big screen peers but that is no longer the case. The quality of television–at least at the top of the food chain–has never been better. The broadcasting industry still making a ton of money. That might not be the case for long–projecting out to 2021 spending on every form of consumer media and entertainment is expected to increase *except* for ‘traditional television and home video’ (-0.7% projected decline) and ‘newspapers’ (4% projected decline). As for the big screen, things aren’t much better with a projected revenue growth of 1.3% and TV doesn’t get much of a boost from selling commercials with TV advertising expected to grow by a mere 1%. The big winners? The still nascent VR industry (+64%), E-sports (+22%), Internet advertising (+9.9%), Internet video (+9.6%) and video games (6.3%).

My guess? They’re understating the growth at the top and the revenue decline at the bottom. My peer group is admittedly very tech savvy but no one I know watches TV the ‘old fashioned way’. Movies aren’t much different–I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie in a theater. The entertainment industry en toto is changing and mutating with alarming velocity. The world that the TV and film industries once knew and dominated doesn’t exist any more and it’s only going to get worse for them.

Or at least that’s the narrative as I see it but here’s the strange thing–the industry specific data has remained fairly consistent at least my some significant metrics. In the film industry the total US box office gross has more than doubled since the late 1990’s and has been in the neighborhood of $10 or $11 billion per for most of the past decade. The average ticket price has also more than doubled since the late 1990’s but that brings us to the next point–total tickets sold has remained remarkably constant for decades at somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion. According to the Box Office Mojo data 2017 will finish with right around 1.2 billion tickets sold–precisely the same number that was sold in 1984.

My first guess was that fewer films were getting released theatrically but that’s not the case either. In 2016, there were 736 films released in US cinemas; twice the number as in 2000. The number has been on a steady climb since the early 1980’s. The number of theater screens in the US has also increased throughout the past decade. Many are in ‘multiplex’ facilities but while the number of US cinema sites has dropped it was by less than I thought from 7,151 in 1995 to 5,398 this year. Keep in mind that it’s pretty much a consensus opinion that the US movie theater industry was at a significant level of excess capacity in the mid to late 1990’s. The US lost around 1,300 cinema sites between 1999 and 2001 but have only had a net loss of around 500 in the 16 years since.

The television industry data is similar–demand and financials appear to be consistent over the past couple of decades. There’s more to this story both in TV and film but I’ve got to do some more digging through statistical data to figure out what it is.

Here’s the 2018 SAG TV Awards betting odds:

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD (SAG) TV AWARDS BETTING ODDS

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST ACTRESS IN A LIMITED SERIES/MADE FOR TV MOVIE’

Nicole Kidman (Big Little Lies): -700
Jessica Lange (Feud: Bette and Joan): +650
Laura Dern (Big Little Lies): +650
Reese Witherspoon (Big Little Lies): +1700
Susan Sarandon (Feud: Bette and Joan): +1700

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST ACTOR IN A LIMITED SERIES/MADE FOR TV MOVIE’

Robert De Niro (The Wizard of Lies): -225
Jeff Daniels (Godless): +450
Alexander Skarsgard (Big Little Lies): +450
Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock: The Lying Detective): +900
Geoffrey Rush (Genius): +900

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES’

Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale): -900
Claire Foy (The Crown): +750
Robin Wright (House of Cards): +750
Laura Linney (Ozark): +1500
Millie Bob Brown (Stranger Things): +1500

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES’

Sterling K. Brown (This Is Us): -250
Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones): +500
David Harbour (Stranger Things): +500
Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul): +750
Jason Bateman (Ozark): +750

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES’

Alison Brie (GLOW): -135
Uzo Aduba (Orange Is The New Black): +300
Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep): +300
Jane Fonda (Grace and Frankie): +750
Lily Tomlin (Grace and Frankie): +750

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES’

Marc Maron (GLOW): +170
Sean Hayes (Will & Grace): +170
William H. Macy(Shameless): +450
Aziz Ansari (Master of None): +750
Anthony Anderson (Black-ish): +750
Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm): +900

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST ENSEMBLE IN A DRAMA SERIES’

The Handmaid’s Tale: -300
Stranger Things: +275
Game of Thrones: +750
The Crown: +1600
This Is Us: +1600

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST ENSEMBLE IN A COMEDY SERIES’

GLOW: -350
Black-ish: +500
Orange Is The New Black: +750
Curb Your Enthusiasm: +750
Veep: +1250

2018 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD FOR ‘BEST TV STUNT ENSEMBLE’

Game of Thrones: -200
Glow: +300
The Walking Dead: +750
Stranger Things: +750
Homeland: +1500

About the Author: Jim Murphy

For more than 25 years, Jim Murphy has written extensively on sports betting as well as handicapping theory and practice. Jim Murphy has been quoted in media from the Wall Street Journal to REASON Magazine. Murphy worked as a radio and podcasting host broadcasting to an international audience that depended on his expertise and advice. Murphy is an odds making consultant for sports and 'non-sport novelty bets' focused on the entertainment business, politics, technology, financial markets and more.