January 25, 2018

With so much attention paid to what wins the most noms I began to wonder, what effect do the hundreds of articles that on Tuesday carried the title âThe Shape of Water gets the most Oscar nominations with 13â have on filmâs performance this weekend? It has the most nominations right, so it must mean most people will go see it, right?

Of all the movie news articles published every year, I imagine the Oscar announcement is by far the easiest. There seems to be a simple tradition when nominations come out: you talk about the big above-the-line nominations (actors, director, picture), you mention some snubs, you post the full list and most importantly you run with some form of this title: âMOVIE gets the most nominations with NUMBER, OTHER MOVIE and ANOTHER MOVIE get NUMBERâ. Itâs a smart and simple shorthand, most nominees = the most important film. This of course isnât always true: in the last 10 years, only four times has the film with the most nominations won Best Picture and two of those shared the most nominations with another film. Still it makes sense why writers lead with that record-holderâitâs usually the one film that gets to spread that divide between above and below the line, the technical vs artistic awards if you will.

Well, looking back at the last ten years of âmost nominationsâ winners, Iâve found the results to be (like everything box office related) complicated and not clear cut. Most films in this category do increase from their previous weekend, usually around 20%â45%. Most see a weekend ranging between $2 million and $12 million, and all but two of these films added theaters on their post-nomination weekend, usually between 50 and 300 theaters.

So, while there is an increase, itâs not really to the level that it feels remarkable or guaranteed. In fact 2010 saw both of the most-nominated films, Avatar and The Hurt Locker, see a negative or null impact. On its post-nomination weekend Avatar lost 74 theaters and saw a 27% decrease with a weekend of $22.8 million, but thatâs to be expected as by this point it had already become just the second film to cross $600 million domestic and was so far beyond the realm of needing an Oscar boost that I would not be shocked if the Best Picture Nominee stickers were kept in their boxes at Fox headquarters. And the Hurt Locker wasnât even in cinemas anymoreâthe only film in the last decade not currently running when nominations were announced. Unsurprisingly Hurt Locker still holds the record as the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in the last 30 years.

If thereâs one notable effect and perfect strategy to get a post-nomination bump it is that a film needs to be facing a big expansion, usually for the first time. The previous two winners of this category focused the best on this strategy, La La Land and The Revenant. While The Revenant dropped 20.2%, it still pulled in the best post-nominations weekend for a film in this prestigious group in the last decade with $31.7 million, securing it as a major box office force. On the other hand, La La Land perfectly timed its 3,000+ theatrical release to the weekend after the nominations were announced. Up to that point, the film had been pulling in unbelievable theater averages. The result was a $12.2 million weekend with a 45% increase. La La Landâs expansion came at an absolutely perfect time with a mix of hype and headlines that will be tough to ever repeat.

It seems that in large part you have to already have a pretty successful box office run and be timed well with the nominations to really matter. In that respect, Shape of Water may be alright. Already the film has seen a 250% increase in sales on Fandango and is expected to have its biggest expansion yet this weekend. However the film hasnât cracked $5 million yet for a weekend in its first 8 weeks, so it will really have to buck the trend with an increase of over 375% to reach over $10 million. Generally you donât see percentage increases like that for recently-released films in this field. The only ones reaching those heights were The Grand Budapest Hotel and Gravity which both came out fairly early. Gravity only scored an $1.8 million post-nominations weekend while unsurprisingly, given it had basically played out in theaters, Grand Budapest Hotel had the worst post-nominations weekend with just $33 thousand.

It may be even more than timing, as content could play a large part as well. Two of the best post-nominations weekends that a Best Picture nominee had were American Sniper, which made $89.2 million after nominations, marking an insane 15,304% increase and Zero Dark Thirty, which made $24.4 million post nominations for a 806% increase. Both of those films were much more notable as firebrand political movies than as Oscar contenders and I think their box office success would have been fairly similar whether they were awarded or not.

This isnât to say that the nominations donât matter or that Shape of Waterâs achievements arenât impressive. Rather, itâs one thing I always love to stress: box office is never black and white. It would make sense that the film that got the most Oscar nominations would increase their box office immensely but the real world is more complicated than that. Oscar talk has been very important to the run of Shape of Water and it will continue to be, but ultimately most films just arenât in the right position or even have the right content to fully capitalize on that headline boost

Edit: The weekend numbers for Shape of Water are in. The film jumped 161% with $5.7 million to come in at #8. While nowhere near the top jumps or weekend gross for a most nominations film, Shape of Water still really timed its release well to capitalize on the nominations with the widest expanse for any nominated film this year with 1,000 theaters added.

M.I. Barish