20 Weeks To Oscar: Box Office

Here is a look at the entire Oscar Best Picture picture in terms of box office as of today:

It’s worth noting that the expansion of the Oscar field to as many as 10 Best Picture nominees has changed the dynamics of box office and the nominations significantly. It has opened up the Academy. In the five years with the potential of a larger field, the norm has become that three films with grosses under $25m at the time of nominations get Best Picture nods. Last year, that grew to four.

In the 10 years prior to the expansion to as-many-as-10-BP-nods, with just five nominees each year, there were 12 nominees that got their nods while their gross was under $25 million.

Fifteen of these sixteen pre-nom low grossers in the last five seasons are, truly, “small” movies. They are not what we came to be used to with Harvey Weinstein slingshotting his commercial movies by using Oscar. These small films are, increasingly, getting a real “Oscar Bump,” even if the concept is antiquated amongst the wide-release movies.

Of all of these Under-$25ms in these last five seasons, only The Weinsteins with The Artist and Sony with Zero Dark Thirty really held a movie that went on to have a wide release but stayed small until nominations. (Another factor in this is that The Academy moved its nomination day up two weeks just two years ago. This will be the third year of nominations coming out in the first half of January.)

It started slowly in 2009, with The Hurt Locker opening in summer, A Serious Man being out of theaters, and An Education getting a small bump in 2009. 2010 wasn’t all that exciting either, though 127 Hours did about a third of its business after being nominated. But The Kids Are All Right and Winter’s Bone were both summer films.

In 2011, Weinstein did slingshot The Artist and it did almost three-quarters of its business after its nomination… but this was also a highly specialized film in black + white, and silent, with actors unknown in the U.S. Also hoping to slingshot was Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, from WB, which opened on six screens on Christmas and held until the week before nominations. However, the film widened to $10 million the weekend before nominations and its trajectory from there wasn’t really different than you would expect without an awards push. The third film, Tree of Life, opened in summer.

In 2012, the biggest slingshot was Silver Linings Playbook, though it went into nominations with $35 million and then took off big time. The aforementioned Zero Dark Thirty was held in check by Sony until nominations, though that was probably a political choice more than a marketing/distribution preference. Beasts of the Southern Wild was a summer opener, which re-opened, then did another $1.5 million after nominations. But Amour was a great story for Sony Classics. The film never went wide. 333 screens max. But the film generated over $6 million off of its Oscar nod… almost double Haneke’s previous best in the U.S.

Last year, Philomena, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, and Nebraska were all in the under-$25m club going into nominations. Four different studios. One indie, one dependent, two majors. Each one of the four films had been on at least 537 screens before nominations. One had gone as wide as it was ever going to go. $15 million for Philomena, $10 million for Dallas Buyers Club, $15 million for Her, and $9 million for Nebraska all feel like found Oscar money to me.

The question is, will this become a full-on trend?

If you listen to the buzz, the current focus of the season is all on movies that have grossed under $25 million. There are 2 unopened movies in the current Gurus o Gold Top 10, but of the 8 that have opened, only Gone Girl has grossed more than $24 million domestically. Theory, Imitation, and Wild all show the potential to pass that mark, but how quickly? Birdman, if garnering a load of nominations as expected, passes $25 million… but we’re looking at perceptions before nominations here.

And then the bigger question… what does the history of box office in Academy voting really mean? The sense in the past was that the perception of success was critical to voters choosing to vote for their true favorites, not wanting to “Waste” their vote. After The Hurt Locker won with less than $15 million in the box office till… after The Artist won with $32 million… And even 12 Years A Slave at $50 million and 4 well-respected contenders over $100 million… does “a wasted vote” exist anymore?

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