In a viral video from final month’s Oscar nominees luncheon, Steven Spielberg thanked Tom Cruise for serving to save “all the theatrical business” with “Top Gun: Maverick.”
The high-flying sequel is the uncommon latest megahit to turn into a real awards contender, with six Oscar nominations – together with finest image – on high of its $718.7 million U.S. haul. And with different high-grossing films together with “Elvis” and “Avatar: The Approach of Water” up for the Oscars’ largest prize, the query turns into: Is the academy able to honor a blockbuster once more?
A blockbuster is mostly outlined as a film that makes greater than $150 million, though the goalpost could transfer as excessive as $250 million to 300 million, relying on the movie’s price range. Twenty years in the past, it wasn’t unusual to see films whose boffo field workplace matched their awards bona fides, with action-packed epics resembling “Titanic,” “Gladiator” and “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” all selecting up a number of Oscars together with finest image. However lately, the most effective image winners have trended towards smaller, artier movies together with “CODA” and “Nomadland,” which have been beloved by critics however largely off the general public’s radar.
Earlier than Sunday’s Oscar telecast (ABC, 8 EDT/5 PDT), Boxoffice Professional chief analyst Shawn Robbins appeared via the final quarter-century of Oscar finest image winners and the way they evaluate on the field workplace to this yr’s crop of nominees:
To research the information, Robbins checked out 25 years of U.S. theatrical receipts after which adjusted for inflation utilizing a mixture of unbiased analysis on ticket costs since 2020 and the Nationwide Affiliation of Theatre House owners’ reported common ticket costs.
Extra: Who has the most Oscars? Top awarded actor, film of all time ahead of 2023 Academy Awards.
“It is vital to have a look at inflation-adjusting with an amazing quantity of context,” Robbins says. “Evaluating the efficiency of movies from 20 years in the past to these of right now is loaded with caveats, not the least of which is the fact of how a lot the leisure media panorama has modified,” thanks, partially, to the provision of streaming and digital releases, which make many viewers much less prone to go to theaters.
“All through many of the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, there was nonetheless some frequent floor between what audiences most wished to see and what the business thought-about worthy of its highest creative honor,” Robbins says. “The hole between these two has significantly widened with solely occasional exceptions over the previous 15 years.”
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