How Box-Office Doom Is Impacting the Oscar Race: “The Audience Is Just Not There”

When Elvis hit theaters in June, first to a smash opening weekend and then to a cumulative global haul of $286 million, an Oscar contender was finally born. The Warner Bros. biopic premiered outside the typical fall corridor of major awards releases, received fairly mixed reviews, and came from director Baz Luhrmann, whose films hadn’t grabbed significant Academy attention in a couple of  decades. But then audiences showed up in droves. “That film was able to jump-start its campaign, and the studio felt comfortable doing it, because the movie made money,” says an awards strategist familiar with Elvis’s marketing. “If the movie bombed, there’s very little chance there would be any sort of awards campaign happening right now.”

You could say the same of A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once or Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick. Along with Elvis, these movies, released in 2022’s first half, have emerged as strong best-picture players months later, largely on the backs of their post-COVID theatrical successes. This hit-to-contender pathway has long been familiar for studio releases, from The Sixth Sense to American Sniper to Bohemian Rhapsody, as well as for acclaimed indie fare. Recent smaller titles—Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Jojo Rabbit; Lady Bird; and Moonlight—all managed to outgross their sub-$25 million budgets in domestic box office sales, and received best picture nominations. Such a combination had been, until the wreckage of the pandemic, standard for any awards season. But in what was supposed to be the specialty box-office’s comeback year, and with Everything Everywhere the only movie remotely on that path in 2022, it’s looking increasingly, dangerously rare.

Many of 2022’s strongest Oscar players, including Tár and The Banshees of Inisherin, platformed to decent starts in limited release—that is, hitting four or so theaters on opening weekend—before fizzling when going wide. The Todd Field drama, starring best actress front-runner Cate Blanchett, expanded to more than 1,000 theaters at the end of October but has brought in $5.1 million to date. Martin McDonagh’s Banshees, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, also opened wide nearly a month ago and has yet to cross $10 million in domestic sales. (His similarly darkly comic Three Billboards finished at more than $50 million in 2017.) Other notable movies, such as Universal’s She Said and Focus’s Armageddon Time, have bombed unequivocally, again despite strong reviews. As the bad news has piled up, incoming contenders like Sony Classics’s The Son and UAR’s Women Talking have abruptly pushed their openings by a few weeks or even months. 

These indie films have, largely, met with excellent reviews and sparked powerful cultural conversations. But “the audience is just not there anymore for these sorts of movies,” says another senior awards strategist, who’s worked on both blockbuster and specialty fare this season. 

Though people are clearly eager to go out after two years of streaming from their couches, it’s mostly for can’t-miss tentpoles like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which has earned $372 million in the U.S. “Art house and prestige movies are having the longest road to recovery after the pandemic,” says box office analyst Shawn Robbins, who suggests that audiences have become accustomed to streaming these movies, many of which are available to buy or rent mere weeks after they debut in theaters. A studio executive says turnout has been especially low among adult women, who are the target demo for titles like She Said and Women Talking. “We need to get them back in the habit of going to theaters.” 

It doesn’t help that there aren’t many uplifting stories in this year’s crop of Oscar contenders. “All the movies that have not worked seem to be super serious, super earnest,” says another studio executive. It’s not exactly new that period pieces, memoirs, and movies about making movies, like Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, can be tough sells. But heavy dramas aren’t exactly new to the scene, either. Recent indie best-pic nominees like Lion, 12 Years a Slave, and Manchester by the Sea all made around $50 million domestically, despite their grim subjects.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to argue that these are bad movies,” says Robbins. “The problem is that most of Middle America, which is the bulk of the moviegoing audience, isn’t interested in going to see them.” 

Tár and Banshees remain strong across-the-board contenders, and the same will likely be true of Women Talking. (All three premiered to great fanfare at major fall festivals in Venice and Telluride.) The Fabelmans, which has grossed nearly $3.9 million domestically—the studio expects it to grow on strong word of mouth—will be a front-runner regardless of where it goes from here. So, the campaign infrastructure for each of these movies remains robust, disappointing box-office returns be damned. These specialty studios “realize that they have to do campaigns for these movies or else these movies are not going to be made anymore,” says an awards strategist. “I think that the awards campaign still helps with word of mouth and prestige.”

Vanity Fair has learned that during this awards cycle, multiple specialty studios have scaled back campaign commitments, in terms of sheer dollars, relative to recent years. Part of this has to do with the strength of their contenders, but also with a shifting allocation of resources, and a recognition that to meet the new reality, more must be done with less. “I think some studios are realizing how much money they’ve been spending on awards campaigns, especially for movies that aren’t making money at the box office,” the awards strategist says. “And they have realized that they can still run a good campaign without spending $10 million.”