THE YEAR-END AWARDS CONTENDERS | December 9 to 11, 2022 weekend
Box office charts and commentary
The current weekend: December 9 to 11, 2022
No new wide releases this weekend. We’ll get back to that next weekend with Avatar 2, which is looming large.
1) The year-end awards contenders
- As noted, this year's awards season has an unusually high number of big movies, including (alphabetically) Avatar, Black Panther, Elvis, Everything Everywhere, Nope, Top Gun and The Woman King. The studios and theatrical distributors are going to benefit from the upcoming high-profile awards campaigns, and it’s going to help mainstream moviegoing.
- Meanwhile, the October-to-December awards releases continue to struggle at the box office. This is a relatively small piece of the business (between 1% and 4% of Hollywood’s total worldwide BO), but the films are important creatively and they reach a loyal and dedicated audience. Each year ebbs and flows with the collection of movies, but since the start of the pandemic, the general trend is down. This is what the last six years look like:
Our readers are studio heads; award-winning filmmakers, artists & Academy members; production, distribution & marketing leaders; elite press; entertainment investment professionals; and movie lovers.
- This year’s films are personal stories — at times challenging, somber, political, and thought-provoking, just like every year. What we don’t have are 1917 ($384.6m worldwide BO), Little Women ($218.8m), The Shape of Water ($195.3m) or The Post ($180.4m). For this year’s movies, there’s little fall-off when watching them at home; the entertainment experience is more than satisfactory. It’s not the same as the big screen, but it's comfortable and it has its advantages:
- After a surge by the streamers during the last couple of years, the theatrically-released awards contenders are getting a lot of attention, and they deserve it. And it is the big, visual, extravagantly mounted movies that are connecting with audiences, not the smaller films.
Just how much is this year’s movies themselves, and how much is a change in the way moviegoers are watching quality films will become clear over time. In 2022 we’ve had a number of original, character-driven pictures that did very well at the BO. There will be smaller movies that break through in the future. There is still a long way to go, but so far this season, audiences are mostly staying home for the year-end awards films.
For additional commentary, please see this NY Times story, here.