Welcome to Statue Season! Each week leading up to the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, we’ll be checking in on the closest races, the winningest narratives, and the plain old movie magic that will decide who’s taking home the gold on March 15, 2026. This week, we’re assessing Netflix’s pursuit of the Best Picture Oscar.
A House of Dynamite, the new thriller from Kathryn Bigelow, debuted in theaters this past weekend. Starring Rebecca Ferguson and Idris Elba, the film follows the immediate aftermath of an unknown country firing a nuclear missile toward the United States and traces the military’s attempt to stop the missile and the White House’s decision to retaliate (or not). It’s the kind of suspenseful, political fare that’s been a mainstay at the Oscars since war films like Wings and 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front took home a couple of the first Best Picture trophies. And Bigelow herself has directed some of the genre’s biggest awards players this century with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, and the trades have predicted that A House of Dynamite could follow in those footsteps.
All of that context would lead you to believe that A House of Dynamite is one of the most significant releases of awards season. So you may also be wondering, Why the hell haven’t I heard of this movie? Alas, Bigelow’s new feature is distributed by Netflix and played on only 200 screens this weekend. (None of which were in an AMC, the biggest movie theater chain in America, because the company won’t adhere to the tiny theatrical windows Netflix requests.) A House of Dynamite’s limited theatrical engagement will run until October 24—less than two weeks away!—at which point the film will be released on the streaming platform.
Pretty unceremonious for an Academy Awards hopeful, right? But this bizarre lack of support isn’t due to Netflix’s indifference toward winning an Oscar. Netflix wants a Best Picture Oscar bad, but it eternally finds itself at odds with the moviegoing culture that is essential to an Oscar-winning film. Since its first foray into content making a dozen or so years ago, the company has built itself on eschewing a theatrical experience for an expansive library of films and television at your fingertips. While that approach obviously changed the entertainment industry and even won Netflix plenty of Emmys to bolster its legitimacy, it has never translated well to the Oscars. And now that movie theaters have built a post-pandemic, post–Hollywood strikes comeback thanks to the revival of blockbusters and a barrage of premium film formats, Netflix is going after that Oscar harder than ever to prove itself as a worthy adversary to the very industry it set out to topple. But how does it get that trophy when the path to the Oscars is antithetical to everything Netflix represents?
We’re on Oscar Watch
Netflix, which announced a deal with The Ringer and Ringer parent company Spotify earlier this week to stream 16 podcasts on its services, has had its eyes on the Academy Awards podium for some time now. 2018’s Roma was its first significant awards player, and it seemed like a lock for Best Picture after it took home the top prizes at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, but it ultimately lost to Green Book. (Apologies for reminding you that Green Book won Best Picture.) Netflix’s subsequent campaigns followed a similar pattern. Acquiring a gangster epic by Martin Scorsese seemed like a surefire way for Netflix to get its foot in the Academy’s door, but the film took home zero statuettes. Mank and The Trial of the Chicago 7 still couldn’t separate themselves in the 2021 slate of contenders that was limited by COVID-19, and All Quiet on the Western Front couldn’t stop the Everything Everywhere All at Once phenomenon in 2023. Even last year’s Emilia Pérez was initially a front-runner, until its campaign catastrophically imploded and it couldn’t even win Best International Feature. (Unfortunately, we were still subjected to that thoroughly cringey acceptance speech for Best Original Song.) The streamer has done decently well in the technical categories (KPop Demon Hunters is looking unbeatable for this year’s Best Animated Feature award), but across 63 total nominations in the Best Picture, Best Director, acting, and screenplay categories, it’s won only four Oscars. Time and again, Netflix lands a big director or produces a film that generates buzz on the festival circuit, but the campaign sputters out by the time the Academy Awards roll around.
This year, Netflix is hoping that quantity is what it will take to land that coveted Best Picture statuette. In addition to A House of Dynamite, Netflix is distributing Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein adaptation, which hits theaters on Friday, and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. It also acquired outside contenders Ballad of a Small Player (Edward Berger’s follow-up to Conclave) and Nouvelle Vague, one of Richard Linklater’s two new films coming out this fall. Those are all getting the same theatrical treatment as A House of Dynamite: a sub-30-day window in select theaters prior to their release on Netflix. These films have also gotten minimal advertisement—you’ll rarely see a trailer for a Netflix film on TV because, you know, the streamer’s marketing is reserved for more important things, like Wednesday cereal.
It’s not implausible to think that Netflix is banking on something like A House of Dynamite to fare better on streaming than in theaters. For one, it’s not actually very good. The film got put on the awards map following its screening at Venice, where it competed for the Golden Lion. While reviews aren’t always a deciding factor in the Best Picture race, the film’s critical reception has notably nose-dived since its premiere. Second of all, the film is going for a pulpy thriller vibe that could play well with its audience: parents who watch every streaming show you’ve never heard of. (Meaning, A House of Dynamite more closely resembles an episode of 24 than a typical prestige-y Oscar drama.) It’s helmed by an ensemble cast that doesn’t feature any huge movie stars outside of maybe Elba, who’s off-screen for the first two-thirds of the film. The movie certainly wouldn’t look out of place on Netflix’s homepage.
But Frankenstein, on the other (surgically attached) hand, would unquestionably benefit from a serious theatrical push. Oscar Isaac, a great actor who’s long been chasing an Academy Award and has box office bona fides, leads the film as Victor Frankenstein, and Jacob Elordi, an extremely in-demand star who’s been on seemingly every auteur director’s radar now that his hit show Euphoria has (allegedly) taken a break between seasons, stars as the monster. Come on, a brooding Nate Jacobs in a hundred layers of SFX makeup tied up like a rotisserie chicken? Surely there’s an audience that would pay for a ticket to that! Plus, outside of the seemingly endless loop of the Black Phone 2 trailer, there isn’t all that much horror playing in cinemas this Halloween season—or, really, for the rest of the year. After Nosferatu became Focus Features’ second-highest-grossing movie ever last winter—and nabbed four Oscar nominations in the process—you’d think Netflix would see the advantage of putting an elevated horror feature in multiplexes, especially around this time of year.
Jay Kelly, too, seems apt for a moviegoing audience. Baumbach, who is coming off cowriting Barbie, has had success working with Netflix before. 2019’s Marriage Story punched wall after wall on its way to six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture (though it won only one—Best Supporting Actress, for Laura Dern). But neither of his other Netflix films, The Meyerowitz Stories and White Noise, caught on (via memes or otherwise), and they were shut out of any Oscar nominations. While Baumbach’s films are generally quaint, middlebrow affairs, Jay Kelly features some undeniable star power, with George Clooney and Adam Sandler leading the way and the rest of the ensemble including Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Isla Fisher, and Greta Gerwig. Clooney’s status as a box office draw has rarely wavered over his illustrious career: The last proper theatrical release in which he had a leading role, 2022’s mediocre Ticket to Paradise, still made over $150 million worldwide. Sandler’s output has shifted almost entirely to Netflix, but when he is featured in the odd theatrical release, the films have been financially successful—like when Uncut Gems broke A24’s domestic box office record.
Dumping these films on streaming leaves them underseen and equated to television rather than prestige cinema, which is why Netflix’s Oscar campaigns keep stalling out. Besides, Apple already beat it to the punch when CODA inexplicably became the first streaming movie to win Best Picture at the 2022 ceremony. But with each passing year, that win is looking more and more like a fluke. The three subsequent Best Picture winners—Everything Everywhere All at Once, Oppenheimer, and Anora—were all box office successes, and no other streamer besides Netflix is projected to have a horse in the Best Picture race this year. How is Netflix supposed to compete with something like Sinners, a box office behemoth that people stood in lines for and was promoted as a transformative in-person experience, when A House of Dynamite is treated with less fanfare than an episode of Love Is Blind? Turns out that the most viable path to an accolade from Hollywood’s old guard might just be playing the old guard’s game.
Stock Watch
To paraphrase one of cinema’s great stockbrokers: Nobody knows if an Oscar stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in circles. In this section, we’ll evaluate who’s on the up-and-up and whose momentum is sputtering out as the competition across categories heats up.
Stock up: Tron: Ares flopped at the box office, but some people are willing to brave a Jared Leto leading performance just to catch that Nine Inch Nails score, which peaked at no. 5 on the Billboard 200. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value continues to impress on the festival circuit, and Renate Reinsve could make some noise in a Best Actress category that’s been looking like it’s Jessie Buckley’s to lose. But Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice has been right there with Trier’s film, heating up the competition in what will be a stacked Best International Feature race.
Stock down: Daniel Day-Lewis is getting slammed in the press for defending Method acting—his Best Actor run for Anemone is cooked. Meanwhile, Variety is giving One Battle After Another the Sinners treatment: bizarre hand-wringing over its projected losses despite it being a totemic cinematic achievement by all accounts. Another pitiful weekend for The Smashing Machine has some predictors taking Dwayne Johnson completely out of the running for even a nomination—I guess prosthetics may not be undefeated at the Oscars after all.
