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 breaking down how much box office success impacts a Best Picture campaign.
That movie that was supposed to be in hot contention for the Oscars this year? Well, it turns out it flopped. The Emma Stone–Yorgos Lanthimos vehicle Bugonia, which surely was intended to repeat the pair’s past success with the Academy, “still hasn’t recovered a 10th of its $55 million budget.” Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere failed to serenade audiences at the box office and “will have to vie to stay relevant to moviegoers in the weeks ahead.” That Julia Roberts–Luca Guadagnino thriller that looked like a shoo-in for Best Actress? It “barely made a dent.” Same with The Smashing Machine, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and Caught Stealing. Even just this past weekend, Sydney Sweeney was zeroed in on for her first Oscar nomination after she spent months getting jacked to portray pro boxer Christy Martin in the new biopic Christy … only for the film to debut with “one of the worst openings in box office history.” Even a movie you thought was a definitive success? Think again: The breathlessly acclaimed One Battle After Another “is tracking to lose $100 million in its theatrical run.”
The hand-wringing over box office returns is a bizarre phenomenon, and it’s led to some doomerism that doesn’t necessarily reflect the way an average person digests a new film. If you walk out of a movie theater and your first thought is “I liked that!” or “I didn’t like that!” or something of that ilk—congrats! You are normal. I’ll even allow opening Letterboxd on the walk back to your car from the multiplex. But if you’re doing A Beautiful Mind–esque box office projection math before you form an opinion on the movie you just watched, you might have read one too many Variety headlines about how Sinners wasn’t technically profitable after its first weekend. These inflammatory articles about flops and bombs and the death of theatrical cinema may have you thinking that screaming “chicken jockey” at the screen is the only way to actually get people to the movies these days. But that doesn’t mean box office results are the only—or even a valid—measure of a film’s success.
This discourse isn’t new—hell, the dual identity of American cinema as both an artistic endeavor and a capitalist product is just as old as the medium itself—but after a number of recent crises plagued Hollywood and raised questions about the future of theatrical cinema, the box office has taken on a more urgent role in the quest to “save” movies. As a result, underperforming financially has genuinely affected the Oscar chances of films with awards aspirations. Gold Derby saw the Best Picture odds for Deliver Me From Nowhere and The Smashing Machine plummet after their disappointing openings—which, to be fair, may have just been due to those films’ mixed receptions. But, still, there’s gotta be 10 films to round out the slate of Best Picture nominees. So is a successful box office run actually essential to a film’s Best Picture résumé?
Let’s start with the current front-runner for the Academy’s top prize: One Battle After Another. This is a big lightning rod in the “profitability” discourse—it’s a critically adored, fantastic film that’s already being touted as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the decade. But its rumored $130 million–plus production cost has the trades abuzz, and the Warner Bros. film probably won’t recoup that cost, even with its strong theatrical showing. One Battle has grossed $200 million worldwide—surpassing that budget price tag—but Variety says that the film needs to gross roughly $300 million to break even due to additional marketing costs, and it isn’t on pace to meet that goal.
Look, I don’t know where these numbers come from! In cinephile circles, One Battle is bigger than the Super Bowl, and no number of articles deeming it a flop could undermine its success. And, as of now, its Best Picture run doesn’t seem to have been deterred either. Variety—which is often the culprit of this box office scolding—still has One Battle After Another leading the Best Picture pack, and is even predicting it will tie the record number of nominations by a single film: 14. I’m not one to give Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, the man of a thousand shelvings, any artistic credit, but is it possible that, in a banner year for the studio, Warner Bros. was prepared to take a loss on Paul Thomas Anderson’s film because it would likely make up for that loss in acclaim and accolades? Perhaps. The studio is going to end the year in the black, and a slew of Academy Awards would certainly be another feather in its cap. Maybe the Academy will see that calculation.
It’s Statue Season
That said, One Battle winning Best Picture without outgrossing its budget domestically would certainly be an anomaly. Sure, it’s sold far more tickets than last year’s victor, Anora, which topped out at $20 million stateside. But with a low budget of $6 million, Anora never had the reputation of being a financial loss hampering its Oscar campaign. The two Best Picture winners before that—Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All at Once—were straight up undeniable box office phenomena. In fact, according to The Numbers’ box office data (which goes back to 1964), the only two Best Picture winners in the past 60 years to underperform their production budgets domestically were Nomadland, which had a limited release in COVID-stricken 2020, and CODA, which came out on Apple’s streaming platform the following year.
While that seems like a damning statistic for One Battle’s Oscar hopes, an obvious explanation for the outlier is that Best Picture hopefuls don’t usually have nine-digit budgets. Movies were made much more cheaply before the $100 million threshold was first passed in the mid-’90s—One Battle would be just the fourth Best Picture winner with a budget over that number, joining Titanic, Gladiator, and Oppenheimer.
However, since One Battle will not reach the commercial heights of those three predecessors, could that leave the door open for Sinners, a genuine event blockbuster whose box office bona fides are more in line with those of the big-budget Best Picture winners before it? Ryan Coogler’s vampire flick (and a fellow Warner Bros. production) made $280 million domestically, but it wasn’t immune to this year’s box office concern trolling: Over the summer, the trades were fussing over the exact dollar amount Sinners needed to cross to technically break even, which led audiences and Hollywood at large to accuse them of downplaying the success of a predominantly Black film. Eventually, Variety conceded that the no. 5 movie at the domestic box office this year was, in fact, profitable. But that controversy has hardly stalled Sinners’ awards campaign: Gold Derby has the film’s Best Picture odds just barely trailing those of One Battle and Chloé Zhao’s yet-to-be-released Hamnet. After COVID and the Hollywood strikes threw the viability of theatrical cinema into question, a truly original smash hit movie carries some cachet in an industry that’s been looking to revive itself for half a decade now. To the Academy, Sinners might represent Hollywood’s lifeboat, while One Battle could look like the thing that’s sinking it. That may seem like a narrow, business-minded perspective rather than an artistic one, but Sinners was also widely acclaimed (though maybe not quite as effusively as One Battle), and the film connected with audiences for a reason. As a success both financially and artistically, the Academy could see Sinners as the best of both worlds.
Then there’s the rest of the Best Picture slate, which is still looking a little murky. Two of the most formidable challengers for the award haven’t come out yet: the aforementioned Hamnet and Josh Safdie’s ping-pong odyssey, Marty Supreme. Both are mid-budget, with the latter on the higher end, and they will release with lots of pent-up awards season hype, which will probably translate to some box office success even if they don’t gross as much as Sinners or even One Battle. There’s also the Netflix of it all: I’ve previously covered the streamer’s strange, anti-theatrical release strategy in its pursuit of a Best Picture statuette in this column—and since then, another Netflix distribution, Train Dreams, has emerged as a potential Oscar player—and part of that strategy is that the company doesn’t release box office numbers for the few weeks its films are playing on big screens. The streaming model worked for CODA—though that was quite literally a near-1-in-100 outcome—and Netflix is hoping to earn itself a trophy by eschewing movie theaters, outside of a few limited, awards-qualifying runs. Rounding out the Best Picture contenders are the also-yet-to-be-released big-budget sequels Avatar: Fire and Ash and Wicked: For Good, which will surely make sizable dents at the box office but might lack the artistic prestige of some of their competitors.
Here’s the bottom line: The average person doesn’t care if Warner Bros. or any studio makes money. And I know I just wrote a whole column about it, but … neither do I! I enjoyed Sinners and One Battle, and I hope people who haven’t seen them yet get a chance to. That’s the extent of my investment in those movies as, well, investments. Most people don’t even go that far. Sinners and One Battle were probably the only original movies many people saw in a theater this year, and the movies were successes to viewers as long as they justified the price of admission. The Academy doesn’t necessarily think like the average person, but it does seem to use the box office as a gauge for what movies are permeating beyond the Hollywood bubble. A lot of people saw both Sinners and One Battle, even if one is technically a financial success and one isn’t. The fact that box office disappointment has actually taken some films out of contention but hasn’t seemed to affect One Battle yet speaks to the film’s artistic merit—and maybe that’s strong enough to take it all the way to Best Picture.
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: Guillermo del Toro has taken to clowning on Film Twitter prompts to campaign for Frankenstein’s Best Production Design nomination. Sentimental Value opened on only four screens in the U.S. this past weekend and still managed to make $200,000 (and, probably, a lot of cinephiles cry). Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are back making the press tour rounds for Wicked: For Good—they’re ready to hold space for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress trophies.
Stock down: Sydney Sweeney has probably been plastered all over your social media feeds this week (or, more accurately, this year), but you surely won’t see her name among this year’s Oscar nominees after Christy got knocked out at the box office this weekend. Benny Safdie has turned his attention away from his Oscar campaign and toward … the Mushroom Kingdom? Well, I guess he knows The Smashing Machine’s awards run is over.
Inconclusive (stock sideways?): A Timothée Chalamet Oscar campaign has started, which means he’s back in the press earnestly expressing how badly he wants to win a statuette. The jury’s out on whether that strategy will work out for him this time.
