Monday, March 20, 2006

Post-Oscar Round-up

Brandon Gray has some interesting figures on how terribly the 2005 Oscar-nominated movies have performed.

Start with the total gross of the five Best Picture nominees--at $240M. Since 1995, the previous low was $306M. And Crash is, according to Gray, the least-attended Best Picture winner ever.

But the most interesting stat can be found in this weekend's numbers, where it seems that none of the Oscar-nominated movies got much of a boost.

This runs counter to the work done by Randy Nelson of Colby College, who in 2001 determined that a Best Picture nomination adds, on average, $4.8M to a film's cume, while a Best Picture win adds $12.7M.

Mind you, Crash should have expected less of a bounce than that, since it was an early release. As Nelson explains:
. . . a Best Picture nomination for a film released in the first quarter of the year is worth an additional $673,082, while the same filmed released in the fourth quarter would add an additional $7,830,000. The corresponding estimates for a Best Picture award are $2,737,124 and $16,030,730, respectively.

Still, Crash's $342,709 is pretty underwhelming.

It'll be interesting to watch over the next few years to see if the 2005 Oscars were an aberration or if the disappearance of the Oscar bonus is another sign of how the economics of the industry are changing.

1 comment:

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