Box-office success is a strong indicator of Oscars failure at this year’s Academy Awards, with the two highest-grossing best picture nominees among those titles least likely to win.
Wicked and Dune: Part Two have both made more than $700m globally, but neither is tipped – by anyone – to pick up the top prize on Sunday in Hollywood. Wicked, Jon M Chu’s first half of his adaptation of the Broadway musical, is currently on $728m, from an estimated $150m production budget.
As with all budgets, this does not account for marketing, which includes worldwide press tours as well as advertising, and can add an extra 40% or so on top of the original spend. With blockbusters such as Barbie, that secondary figure can even surpass the original budget.
Denis Villeneuve’s second instalment in his projected Dune trilogy cost around $190m and has made some $714m. However, all four of the anonymous Oscar voters recently polled by Entertainment Weekly said they had not seen it and would be omitting it from their ranking – the top Oscars are decided by preferential ballot – because, as one put it, “I’m not rushing for another three hours of Dune.”
Meanwhile, the runaway box-office winner for 2024 – Pixar’s Inside Out 2 – which made $1.7bn from a $200m budget, had been expected to figure significantly on this year’s nominations lists, but ended up with just an animation nod. It’s widely expected to lose out to Latvian cats cartoon Flow ($3.6m budget, $17m gross).
The Academy has long had a conflicted relationship with box-office returns, one closely tied to its desire to remain relevant by attracting viewers to its telecast. Highest numbers for that tend to coincide with moments of lavish celebration of blockbuster hits.
So, in 1998, a record 57.2 million US viewers tuned in to watch Titanic ($2.2bn from a $200m budget) take 11 awards. These numbers maintained a relatively stable correlation, with nearly 44 million people watching in 2004 when Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($1.1bn from a $94m budget) equalled Titanic’s awards tally. But the advent of the internet, a preference for social media snippets (especially among those younger audiences the Academy is especially eager to court) – and the voters’ increasingly arty choices – led ratings to haemorrhage.
In 2021, when Nomadland ($39 from a $5m budget) triumphed, only 10 million people tuned in. Last year, the number had recovered to 19.5 million, thanks to the Barbenheimer effect. Although Greta Gerwig’s satire ($1.4bn from a $140m budget) wasn’t likely to go home with a lot of gongs, it loomed large in a ceremony that dished out the big trophies to Christopher Nolan’s atom bomb drama ($976m from a $100m budget).
This year, the ceremony is being streamed in the US on platforms including Hulu, as well as broadcast on traditional terrestrial partner ABC (in the UK, the ceremony is being show for the second year on ITV, which bought rights from Sky, which in turn inherited them from the BBC).
“I think we’re going to reach a new audience this year,” Academy chief executive Bill Kramer said recently, referencing Hulu’s 18-49 demographic numbers. “We’re very excited about that.”
However, the films predicted to actually scoop the major awards this year have proved less of a smash with audiences than voters or critics. Anora, a comedy-drama about a sex worker who falls for the son of a Russian billionaire, is narrow favourite for best picture in the final furlong.
Although strikingly profitable – making some seven times its $6m budget – Sean Baker’s film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, was always a niche theatrical release, and has now moved to streaming.
Speaking earlier this month, Brady Corbet, director of three-and-a-half hour Vistavision postwar drama The Brutalist, now second-place favourite after Anora’s ascendancy, said that audiences would probably be surprised how little money Oscar-nominated directors take home.
“I made zero dollars,” from the film, he said, adding that many of his lauded peers “can’t pay their rent”. “If you look at certain films that premiered in Cannes,” he said, “that was almost a year ago.” The Brutalist, which has so far made $37m return from its $10m budget, premiered at the Venice film festival last August. “So I’ve been doing this for six months.”
Along with Anora, the films that began at Cannes and progressed to the 10-strong best picture list this year are Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s crime musical, which was acquired by Netflix after the festival but before the succession of controversies that would subsequently engulf it.
Both films fared differently financially: sufficient numbers were tempted to the cinema to see the Demi Moore-starring body horror for it to make back a fourfold return. But only 58% of Emilia Pérez’s budget was recouped in bricks-and-mortar locations.
There has been disappointment, too, for Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’s experimental Colson Whitehead adaptation, which many hoped might repeat the success of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, the best picture winner that upended La La Land in 2017.
Yet its chances look very slim on Sunday – and the numbers are bleak, with just a 10th of Ross’s $20m budget coming back in ticket stubs. Keeping production costs tight is clearly key here. Although Conclave and A Complete Unknown (both still possible victors on Sunday) have taken in the region of $100m each, Edward Berger’s papal thriller cost $20m – more than three times less than the Timothée Chalamet-starring Bob Dylan biopic.
The best picture nominee least likely to be concerned by its fleeting odds, however, is Brazilian real-life drama I’m Still Here, which has now made more than 18 times its budget. Regardless, its director, Walter Salles, is not in the camp of beleaguered film-makers described by Corbet: as the heir to Itaú Unibanco, his personal fortune is around $4.5bn.
Article by:Source: Catherine Shoard and Raphael Boyd
