Big Game’s a TV Tuneout, but It Flattens Film Biz : Super Bowl: A TV ratings bust, the Big Game still took a serious toll on business at the nation’s movie theaters.

The San Francisco 49ers’ rout of the Denver Broncos Sunday apparently produced the lowest Super Bowl TV ratings in years, but the event still wreaked its usual havoc at the nation’s movie houses.

Some other performance venues also reported smaller audiences because of the National Football League championship game. At the Canon Theatre in Los Angeles, so many women showed up Sunday to buy tickets for “Meetin’s on the Porch,” a play that focuses on three women’s lives, that the men’s restroom was temporarily converted into a women’s room.

Preliminary figures from the A. C. Nielsen Co. indicated Monday that Super Bowl XXIV may have been the lowest-rated game since 1981.

While final figures won’t be available until today, data from 23 major television markets across the country gave the game a 39.6 rating, which suggests that just over 36 million households watched it.

CBS, which aired Sunday’s contest, estimated that the final number will climb to a 40 rating. With each rating point equaling 921,000 households, that would translate to 36.8 million homes.

That would certainly make this Super Bowl the highest-rated program of the 1989-90 television season, but it would be a less-than-super Super Bowl performance. Last year’s NFL championship was viewed in 39.3 million households. There were 37.1 million households tuned in for the 1988 game.

The lower-than-expected ratings--undoubtedly prompted by the one-sided nature of San Francisco’s 55-10 victory over Denver--apparently will not result in CBS having to reimburse advertisers with “make-good” commercial time. The network had not guaranteed a specific rating for the telecast.

“It’s the chance you take with sports,” said Jon Mandel, senior vice president of Grey Advertising. “You could have an over-delivery (of viewers) or an under-delivery. You accept that risk.”

Whatever the TV ratings, the Super Bowl took a serious toll on business at the nation’s movie theaters.

“The major studios avoid this as an opening date, and grosses were off among the pictures already playing,” said John Krier, president of Exhibitor Relations Inc., which collects box-office results.

Between Friday and Sunday, ticket sales to the popular “Born on the Fourth of July,” starring Tom Cruise as a disillusioned Vietnam vet, dropped about 26% from the previous weekend.

Business for the Sylvester Stallone-Kurt Russell buddy movie, “Tango & Cash,” dropped 17% to $3.6 million--and it dropped 40% on Sunday alone. “War of the Roses” lost 24% of its ticket sales from the previous weekend, and ticket sales for the Paramount thriller “Internal Affairs” fell off by about 20%.

The decline was not surprising. During last year’s Super Bowl weekend, moviegoers also stayed away from theaters in droves, even avoiding big hits. According to Exhibitor Relations, ticket sales to two audience favorites in 1989--”Rain Man” and “Twins”--dropped about 30% from the previous weekend.

This year’s Super Bowl, however, didn’t seem to make much of a dent in the business for “Driving Miss Daisy,” Warner’s sentimental Southern tale starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. After an additional 617 theaters were added to its release, the film became the biggest draw of the weekend, grossing $5.7 million, or $6,375 per screen.

“Clearly it didn’t get hurt as much as ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ ‘Tango and Cash’ or other more male-oriented films,” said Rob Friedman, Warner’s president of worldwide advertising and publicity, who added that “Daisy” has more appeal for female audiences.

The Super Bowl had a mixed effect on attendance at other arts performances.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center reported no slowdown in sales for Sunday’s 2 p.m. matinee performance of “She Loves Me,” the last day of the run for the musical comedy starring Pam Dawber and Joel Higgins. The 2,900-seat Segerstrom Hall was about 85% sold out for the performance by Friday, according to a Center spokesman, who described that as a typical figure for a Sunday matinee.

Attendance at the 5 p.m. matinee of “Tony N’ Tina’s Wedding,” at the Park Plaza Hotel near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, was not affected by the game. But a couple of the actors playing ushers at the simulation of an Italian-American wedding did improvise on Super Bowl themes during the reception. One of them chided another for betting his car on the Broncos, to which the losing bettor replied, “Don’t worry--there are plenty of cars in this neighborhood.”

Publicists for “The Phantom of the Opera,” the Mark Taper Forum productions of the Renaissance Theatre Company and “The Thrill,” and the Los Angeles Theatre Center reported no discernible effect on attendance because of the Super Bowl.

In San Diego, tickets were sold out for a performance of the opera “La Boheme,” while the Old Globe theater noted a slight dip in sales for two plays being performed there.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Zan Dubin, Nina J. Easton, Oscar Garza, Don Shirley and Rick VanderKnyff.