Mainstream entertainment films lifted box office 15.4% year-to-date, but prestige films in the Oscar race are having a lousy year. The fabled “Oscar bounce” at the box office has eluded this year’s Academy Award contenders, notes the “Los Angeles Times.”
“The whispers you hear everywhere around town are asking the same hushed question: What happened to the fabled Oscar bounce?” notes the article by Patrick Goldstein.
Of the five Best Picture contenders, only “The Reader” has made significant money since being nominated Jan. 22. Because the Oscar contenders were end-2008 releases, they were counting on an Academy Awards lift in January-February cinema runs that mostly didn’t happen so far.
Notes the “Los Angeles Times” article, “Here’s one perspective on how little the best picture nominations have meant this year. Even without a best picture nod, Doubt has outgrossed three of the five best picture nominees, while ‘Defiance’ and ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona,’ which barely registered with Oscar voters–earning one major nomination between them–have outgrossed both ‘The Reader’ and ‘Frost/Nixon.’ The latter film is the most striking commercial failure of the season. Losing more theaters each week, ‘Frost/Nixon’ only made a paltry $473,000 this weekend, giving it a total of $16.3 million after 11 weeks in the market, nearly 60% of its overall grosses coming before the Oscar nominations were announced.”
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed over Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” yet at $120 million in domestic box office the contemporary social drama is one of the few prestige films that’s a blockbuster. The other is Paramount’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which is a Best Picture nominee.
Notes the “LA Times” article: “Slumdog Millionaire” is “really the only movie that you could convincingly argue has been aided by award season, though it’s also benefited from Fox Searchlight’s shrewd, brightly colored, cheerfully upbeat ad campaign. Every time it scooped up another armful of awards, it looked less like a forbidding movie set in the grim slums of a faraway country and more like an exotic confection that promises uplift and redemption.”
The book “Marketing to Moviegoers: Second Edition” cites numerous specific examples of films that had little chance of succeeding with audiences that were put into production anyway. One example is the slew of 2007-08 Iraq-Afghanistan war films that all bombed and whose ad campaigns hid the Iraq-Afghanistan connection. “Marketing to Moviegoers” notes that reason is film development staff get excited about projects but give little serious consideration to selling the films to the public, which later becomes the marketing department’s problem.
Concludes Patrick Goldstein in the article: “It’s time for filmmakers to grasp the new reality: The Oscars have become a hollow brass ring. They may be the ultimate status symbol to everyone inside the industry, but outside–in the real world, where Oscar ratings have been steadily dropping–the awards have less and less impact. In the 1970s, during the glory days of Hollywood, filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman were making movies because they were dying to tell great stories.”
Related content:
Leave a Reply