Looking into the Oscar Nominees (Best Picture) of Last 5 Years – Part 1


Looking into the financial performances of popular box-office hit films seems to be a lucrative option these days. There are numerous sites, videos, bloggers, and even vloggers who spend week after week talking about the recent hit films smashing the movie market. Rarely are Oscar nominees talked about unless it’s the 2-3 weeks of Oscar awards season. Even then, the most focus tends to be on the performers or the people behind the scenes. There is also a focus on the critics and reviews, as well as controversies surrounding the movies themselves. 

But what about the financial wins of these films? People are so engrossed with the materialistic and visual recognition, that the actual monetary metrics often go unnoticed (barring some exceptions). Today we are going to partially analyze and understand some of the performance measures that are used by industry experts to judge the financial success of films, and apply these onto the Best Picture nominees of 2014-2018.


The Films
For this post, we are focusing on the 41 films that have been nominated for the Best Picture Award and released between 2014 and 2018 inclusive. These include some of the box-office hits, critics and audience favorites, and some sleeper-hits too. Some of the films on the list were specifically released to be intended for Oscar contention rather than being crowd-pleasers. We are also going to point out some of the common and useful tactics that many producers use to leverage the benefits of Oscar considerations.


Release Times
The Oscar buzz usually starts in the month of September, especially in order to capture the attention of critics and audiences alike. Since the major nominations are all settled within January (next year), production studios always tend to release films towards the end of the year. This ensures that the films are fresh in everyone’s mind, and the media is also more willing to talk about recent films to increase the hypes.


The release times of our 41 films perfectly correlated the strategy, where 24 of the films were released in the last quarter. January had 9 releases in itself, way early for next year’s consideration, but this is another topic entirely. However, February-September only had 8 releases among the nominations; but these included some of the special films including the record-breaking Black Panther, and the summer awaited-releases of Dunkirk and Mad Max: Fury Road. Other than this, we can clearly see the intentions of producers targeting the last 3 months for greater Oscar exposure.



Opening Performance
Using only the opening weekend domestic gross in the financial analysis is a very big misstep, especially since the circumstance or scope of each film is completely different. To standardize this idea, a common metric to measure the longevity and word-of-mouth impact is the domestic multiplier. This is simply a ratio of a film’s overall domestic gross compared to it’s earning on the wide release opening weekend. For instance, a films opens to a $10M revenue. If it conjures a $40M domestic gross at the end of its theatrical run, the movie has a 4x multiplier.

For the 41 films in our nominations, 2 of them are extremely special, with both being much-anticipated and hyped–up films, and therefore have a huge opening weekend gross. A few others had their wide release after getting confirmed nominations. Some of the films performed on the low initially, but the audience impact grew over time after getting the Oscar buzz. Naturally, comparing these films from a small pool is a challenging task. Nonetheless, we are taking a look into the domestic multiplier of these films.

The one outlier in our dataset is “Whiplash”, which has a staggering domestic multiplier of 96.70. The movie opened very disappointingly but gained a massive word-of-mouth after receiving multiple Oscar awards. For this reason, this movie is excluded from the aggregate multiplier stats. The other 40 movies show an average multiplier of 9.16x. Naturally, movies with smaller openings end up with large multipliers as people gain more interest. There is no particular relationship between the multiplier values with either the opening gross or the duration of the theatrical run. However, it clearly seems that December releases tend to attract the largest multipliers.


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