(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.)
I don’t personally dabble in cultural criticism.
Sure, everyone has an opinion (and I do too!) but you come here for strategic advice or data analysis, not movie reviews. Occasionally, in the Streaming Ratings Report, I’ll tell you if I really love a specific TV show—more for transparency reasons than anything else—but that’s about it. That said, my editor/researcher spent over seven years of his life on the development track, so he has lots and lots of opinions on movies and TV shows. (Which I systemically and deliberately prevent him from sneaking into this report.)
I bring this up because I’m begging Academy voters (as I do every year, going back to the start of this newsletter) to nominate more popular films for Best Picture, and I can already hear/feel some people pushing back.
What do you mean? What’s your beef with Anora?
I have no beef with Anora. In fact, my editor thinks it’s just about the best thing since Technicolor. Seriously, he won’t stop talking about it. But even he agrees with me:
If you think that the Oscars matter (and I do), then the Academy needs to nominate more popular films for Best Picture to get people more interested in not just the Oscars, but films, theater-going and critical darlings…like Anora!
So that’s the plan today. I’m going to recommend which popular films Academy voters should nominate for Best Picture. (Voting starts tomorrow and goes through Sunday.) Like the last two years, there are two somewhat obvious blockbuster nominees (Wicked and Dune: Part Two this year; Barbenheimer last year; Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick the year before that), but as I’ll argue below, the Academy needs more than just two blockbuster films to save the show. That, and I’ll reiterate my four point plan to improve the ratings, including dual-casting the ceremony on streaming.
If you’re like my editor and you care about Anora and getting more people to become interested in seeing Anora, then you should care, too, especially if you’re an Academy voter who is ultimately making this call.
More Popular Films Equals Better Ratings
Both Wicked and Dune: Part Two seem like locks to get nominated for Best Picture. Great! But as I just wrote, I don’t think two blockbuster films are enough. Look at this key chart, which I update every year:
To sum up, in the mid-2010s, after a few years of ratings declines—and The Dark Knight getting snubbed—the Academy expanded the number of nominees to ten films, and a number of popular films and blockbusters got nominated for Best Picture (including a few animated films). The ratings rose directly in response.
Now, perhaps you’d rebut, “Well, what about the early 2000s? There weren’t nearly as many blockbusters or popular films, and the ratings were great” True, but as a percentage of Best Picture films, they were. There were only five nominees, meaning half of the nominees were popular or blockbuster films. (That and cord-cutting wasn’t a factor yet, which I’ll discuss later.)
The problem is that, in recent years, outside of the few blockbusters, the rest of the films are very, very obscure. You see this in the gap between the average box office (for films that went to theaters) and the median box office:
That’s right, for the last three years, the median box office of the films nominated for Best Picture has been $15 million, $15 million and $21 million, up from the absolute nadir during Covid-19 of $2.9 million. So nominating a couple of box office juggernauts has helped inch the ratings back up…
…but the low median films keep the ratings from returning to mid-2010s heights. (That, and not being on streaming…) Indeed, in the past, the relationship between median box office and ratings is correlated:
The Academy—by which I mean the voters—may repeat the same pattern this year. Just look at the box office for the likeliest nominees versus a few critically well-regarded popular films:
If the Academy nominates the ten likeliest films according to Gold Derby right now, the median box office would be $16.4 million, below last year.
Increasingly, there are two different groups of films these days: prestige films, which rarely get big box office anymore, and broadly popular films. I think half of the ten Best Picture nominees should be broadly popular films, especially if those films are beloved by audiences and critics (which is very, very hard to do).
So…What Popular Films Should Be Nominated for 2024?
Instead of just imploring the Academy to vote for more popular films, I like to go a step further and recommend some specific films that the Academy should nominate.
To make myself clear: I don’t want to lower the bar for what a “Best Picture” nominated film is. They still need to be great films, but the Academy needs to reward box office hits too.
To make my recommendations, I look at domestic box office, IMDb reviews and Metacritic ratings as proxies for popularity and quality. This year, initially I looked at every film that made over $100 million domestically this year, then made some obvious cuts.
Next, I took a look at the critics and audience scores. My cut-off for quality was at least an average of “70” on Metacritic and a 7.0 on IMDb.
Under this criteria, sadly we lose Twisters (its audience scores were a bit lower than I thought they would be even though this one came from a previous Oscar nominee, Lee Isaac Chung), Gladiator II (this film had some initial Oscar buzz, but didn’t hit either threshold for success), A Quiet Place: Day One (below 70 and 7.0 on both metrics), It Ends With Us, IF (these last two had a 53 and a 46 on Metacritic, which was lower than I remembered), Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Mufasa: The Lion King (also from an Oscar nominee Barry Jenkins) and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which was actually the sixth highest grossing movie of the year.
Thus, two films stand out: Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot, neither of which looks likely to nab a Best Picture nomination.
While I think the critical acclaim is on the side of The Wild Robot, Inside Out 2 was an utter smash hit, grossing billions globally, and has great IMDb scores; viewers loved it. And I think nominating it would help the Academy get younger viewers (both kids and Zoomers) to start watching the Oscars telecast (if it’s, you know, streaming as well). And yes, while both will get nominated for Best Animated Feature, they should get nominations for Best Picture as well.
Really, I’d like both films to get a nod, which also would symbolize 2024 pretty well: animated films dominated the box office, and if the Oscars are a time capsule (being honest, they usually aren’t) this would encapsulate the year pretty well.
Two More Good Ideas: Nosferatu and A Complete Unknown
Perhaps you want more critically-acclaimed, prestige films to nominate. Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.
Through the weekend, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu has earned just under $70 million at the US box office, and will climb higher in the coming weeks. That’s great, especially for a horror film. With a 7.7 on IMDb and a 78 on Metacritic, this is a film that critics love and is clearly resonating with audiences. Horror, as a genre, rarely gets the critical love that it deserves, and I think this is an excellent pick to expand the interest in the nominees to wider audiences.
I’m more on the fence about A Complete Unknown, which hasn’t generated more than $50 million in the US, which is below my threshold for a “maybe popular” film. That said, it’s a biopic by a very famous American cultural icon and it is much more popular than lesser-known awards contenders, so I would prioritize it over other, smaller prestige films.
Like Last Year, Let’s Go Crazy: Nominate Deadpool & Wolverine
Last year, I thought that the Academy should have nominated John Wick 4, a franchise achievement award for its excellent contribution to action films (it deservedly swept the field on Vulture’s stunt awards), and this year, my pitch is another R-rated mega-blockbuster: Deadpool & Wolverine.
Listen, I get it. The Academy and critics and tastemakers hate comic book movies. The Avengers ($1.5 billion global box office, 8 on IMDb with 1.5 million reviews) somehow didn’t get a nod, despite those spectacular numbers. Same goes for Avengers: Endgame ($2.7 billion, 8.4 on 1.3 million reviews) and The Dark Knight (9.0 on 3 million IMDb reviews; I mean, come on).
But at some point, these films represent both what viewers are watching and what cinema is today. I’d reward it. And it would certainly bring in more viewers who don’t normally watch the Oscars, especially young men, the exact demo that, if exposed to Anora, will probably want to watch it. Plus, the Oscars should want Ryan Reynold’s social media marketing machine encouraging people to watch the broadcast.
So for the sake of Anora, nominate Deadpool & Wolverine.
Four Other Ways to Fix the Academy
I think nominating more popular films is the best way to “save” the Oscars, but as I repeat every year, there are four more fixes.
Fix #1: Dual-Cast the Ceremony
Last year, in response to my post-Oscars article, I got an email from someone that made me think, “Wait, that person reads this newsletter? That’s crazy!!!!” (And they complimented me too, which was even more mind-blowing.)
They made an excellent point that Disney and the Academy don’t want to dual-cast the Oscar telecast because of fear of their affiliates, who don’t want their ratings numbers (and carriage fees) to go down, plus the Academy gets a licensing fee from the affiliates, so they don’t want that either.
So, in short, Disney, the affiliates and the Academy make more money keeping the telecast off streaming. For now. They’re just losing potential viewers.
This all gets into the much, much, much more complicated topic of broadcast TV, streaming, disruption, and the innovator’s dilemma. It’s an underrated factor in the streaming wars how much revenue legacy media companies made (and still make) from carriage/transmission fees. In fact, retransmission fees have skyrocketed since 2010.
But the future is streaming. (Partly because of those skyrocketing fees…it’s not a coincidence that cord-cutting accelerated during this period.) The trick for the traditional entertainment players is balancing the transition to streaming without losing this very lucrative revenue source…and there are no easy strategic answers.
But back to the Academy and Disney, I have a few counter-arguments for dual-casting the ceremony:
- We’re nearing nearly a decade of declining/flatlined ratings…at some point, you risk losing the audience forever. You want this show to be a yearly tradition for people and families across America.
- Less than three months ago, Disney nabbed the Grammys from CBS. And they’ll be dual-casting that awards telecast on ABC, Hulu and Disney+. So clearly dual-casting is the medium-term future of awards shows.
I hate “Just make it happen!” style punditry, but in this case, I have to say to the Disney corporation and the Academy, just make this happen. Dual-cast the ceremony. (That said, I’m pretty realistic that this won’t happen. I’ve been banging this drum for years, and I hope I’m pleasantly surprised…eventually.) Whether it’s affiliate fees or Disney possibly wanting low ratings before their next contract negotiation or the Academy wanting more money, figure it out.
Sacrifice short term dollars for longer term success.
Fix #2: Nominate More Popular Songs Plus Let the Stars of Wicked Sing
Easily, the biggest moment from last year’s ceremony was Ryan Gosling singing, “I’m Just Ken”. Everyone loved it.
In short, musical numbers work. A significant portion of the audience watches the Oscars telecast to watch fun musical numbers sung by big stars.
But most years, the songs that get nominated for the “Best Song” award tend to be obscure, non-radio/streaming-friendly tunes, only occasionally sung by a famous person. Even last year, there could have been more big songs, like Timothée Chalamet singing a song from Wonka. Unfortunately, he didn’t get nominated.
And that looks to be the case this year. Emilia Perez has two likely nominees, but that film just flopped on streaming, and “El Mal” only has 300K streams on Spotify. Same goes for Sing Sing’s “Like a Bird” (89K streams on Spotify). Luckily, The Wild Robot’s “Kiss the Sky” has 6 million streams on Spotify, and Maren Morris is a genuine pop star.
But the Academy could do better. The songs “Never Too Late” by Elton John (one of the biggest artists of all-time), “Beyond” from Moana 2 (15 million Spotify streams as of this writing), “Tell Me It’s You” from Mufasa (3 million streams) and “Piece by Piece” by Pharrell Williams (another a genuine pop star) have an outside shot to nab nominations, according to the Gold Derby, with the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th best odds. If you want my advice, voters should vote for these songs from bigger stars and films with a wider audience.
Of course, this year has an added wrinkle in that the best songs of the year aren’t eligible, since non-original songs can’t be nominated. If you want to see the cast from Wicked singing on stage, that won’t happen unless the producers add another musical number and increase the already long runtime. This year, that probably should happen. For context, the film version of the song “Popular” from Wicked already has 60 million plays on Spotify, or about ten times as many as “Kiss the Sky” from The Wild Robot.
Actually, the producers should put in two songs from Wicked in the broadcast!
Fix #3: Move the Start Time Back
Related to the first fix, I hate, hate, hate the new telecast start time (4:00 PM on the West Coast), but old media strikes again. The earlier start time made sponsors happy (they didn’t want high-priced ads airing at low viewership times past 11:00 on the East Coast) and the affiliates’ local news shows (which are very lucrative for them) wouldn’t get bumped if the show ran long like it does every year.
It’s hard to prove either way if the earlier start time affected the ratings; there are just too many factors coming into play. But my gut is that it didn’t work.
Otherwise, wouldn’t the NFL be copying this strategy already? Disney is now airing Monday Night Football games on both ESPN and ABC. Those games start around 8:15 on the East Coast and go past 11:00, presenting the same issues as the Oscar telecast, but clearly Disney bumped local news telecasts for the NFL. I’d apply the same logic to the Oscars.
Fix #4: Move the Oscar Nominations Announcement to Prime Time
Luckily, this fix doesn’t require any rights negotiations. Instead of a 6:00 AM or whatever announcement, Disney needs to air (and stream) an Oscar nominations show (announcing all of the nominees) during primetime.
For Disney, who already does this for College Football playoffs on ESPN, this seems like a no-brainer. Get it done already!
