Barbenheimer Gives The Oscars Some Much Needed Juice

"(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- For much of the early history of the Academy Awards, films that enjoyed major success at the box office, such as and , also tended to win big at the annual event. Having widely known, successful features among the nominees translated into huge audiences for the annual Oscars broadcast, which became one of modern television’s signature events. But in recent years, films outside Hollywood’s blockbuster industrial complex have dominated the prestigious best picture and best director categories. In the past decade, every best picture winner was produced for less than $25 million, and the top-grossing of those winners—2018’s —collected only $320 million in ticket sales, a modest haul compared with that year’s highest-grossing film, from Walt Disney Co.’s Marvel Studios, which made $2 billion..The snubbing of box-office sensations has coincided with shrinking viewer numbers for the Oscars broadcast: Last year’s 18.7 million viewers in the US amounted to less than half the 40.4 million viewers who tuned in to the show in 2013. And even that was small beer compared with the more than 55 million viewers who saw sail away with the big prize in 1998. Since then, the declining number of visits to movie theaters, the proliferation of celebrities on social media and TV cord-cutting have all contributed to the Oscars’ shrinking audience..The Golden Globe awards tried to address this problem by creating an entirely new category in 2023, honoring “cinematic and box-office achievement,” for films that received critical acclaim and also made serious money..This year’s Oscars event, which will be held in Los Angeles on March 10, may break the pattern: The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have pitted two of 2023’s highest-grossing movies— Christopher Nolan’s from Universal Pictures and Greta Gerwig’s from Warner Bros.—against each other in the best picture category. The simultaneous release of those critically acclaimed films last July created the surprising craze that sent legions of fans to the multiplex to see them both. Hollywood regarded the resulting box-office bonanza as a welcome resurrection of the decades-old view that art and commerce can successfully marry..“The Academy has been hoping for something like this to happen, to see several box-office phenomenons in the best picture race,” says Michael Schulman, the author of ..Over the years the Academy has wrestled with how many films to include in the best picture category, with a larger field increasing the chances of more-popular films being in the top competition. After the Nolan-directed Batman film was overlooked in 2009, the Academy expanded the list of nominees to 10 from 5. James Cameron’s blockbuster , the highest-grossing film of all time, scored a nomination the following year, but the trophy went to the Iraq War drama . That film’s $49.2 million box-office tally was among the lowest for an Oscar top prize winner.., which generated almost $1 billion at the box office, is a favorite to win best picture after sweeping this year’s awards circuit including the Golden Globes, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards and several Hollywood guild prizes. If it achieves that feat, it will be the highest-grossing best picture since Peter Jackson’s was released in 2003. It would also be only the third best picture winner in the 95 years of the Oscars to gross more than $500 million: grossed $1.1 billion, and Cameron’s grossed $2.2 billion..“In the past couple of decades, there’s been a kind of contradiction at the heart of the Oscars, because they’ve had to be two things at once—awards of merit for an industry honoring the craft of filmmaking and also a big TV show that has to appeal to a very wide audience,” Schulman says..The erosion in the 2000s of midbudget studio dramas, a genre that had traditionally glued the Oscars to popular taste, has divided Hollywood into two categories, he says: huge tentpole films—big-budget movies with mass appeal and sequel possibilities—and indies. The main reason is ahead of the pack in the race for best picture is because the film “gave the industry a ray of hope. It was an adult biopic about a serious subject, but it’s also an overpowering sensory experience that was worth going to the theater for.”.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com.©2024 Bloomberg L.P."

Barbenheimer Gives The Oscars Some Much Needed Juice

After losing viewers for most of the past three decades, the annual telecast may get a boost this year, thanks to the Oppenheimer-versus-Barbie rivalry.

NDTV Profit

NDTV Profit

Follow Us

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Barbenheimer Gives The Oscars Some Much Needed Juice

After losing viewers for most of the past three decades, the annual telecast may get a boost this year, thanks to the Oppenheimer-versus-Barbie rivalry.

Choose a plan

Follow Us

DOWNLOAD THE APP