Oscar winners and commercial success are growing apart: MC Analysis

Oscar winning movies have been moving away from Commercial Success

Anora may have swept the Oscars over the weekend with five Academy Awards, including the best picture Oscar, commercially, its run has been far from impressive.

Sean Baker’s independent movie has earned $41.3 million at the box office since its release in October, compared with $1.7 billion by Inside Out 2, the biggest grossers of the year.

Anora is not an exception. The gap between Oscar winners and commercial successes has been growing over the past two decades. A Moneycontrol analysis shows that the average box office returns of Oscar Best Picture winners have been at least 28 times lower than those of box- office hits over the past five years.

The 2023 winner Oppenheimer is an outlier, garnering $0.98 billion. Barbie, which, too, was in the running for the Best Picture, earned $1.45 billion, IMDb database shows.

CODA, the best picture winner from 2021, earned 70 times less than the 2021 box office hit Spider-Man: No Way Home, which raked in $1.9 billion. CODA’s earnings include $25 million Apple paid to stream the movie on its streaming platform.

In contrast, during between 2015 and 2019, the difference between the top-grossing film and Oscar winner was 12.5 times. Between 2010 and 2014, it was even narrower at 7.3 times.

Barring The Hurt Locker in 2009, which earned 55.7 times less than the top grossing film of the year, the average difference between the box office hit and Oscar winner was 5.3 times between 2005-09.

The difference was even lower in the preceding decades.

The Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King was not only the Oscar winner for 2003 but was also the top-grosser of the year with earnings of $1.12 billion.

The feat was replicated after Titanic, which earned $1.84 billion from worldwide box office in 1997.

Between 1990 and 1999, the difference between the top-grossing film and the Oscar winner was 3.3, while the gap was 3.2 fold between 1980 and 1989.