I expected A Complete Unknown to get a bigger bump from its Oscar nominations, but that didn't seem to happen. No one I know throws Oscars parties any more, so maybe someone here can remind me; does the Oscars BumpTM come after the nominations, or after the potential statues are awarded?
The bump usually takes two different forms:
1) A movie will get a lot more screens after nominations come out. This will naturally lead to increased box office returns or at least a series of better than expected holds. e.g.
Poor Things went up 900 screens after nominations came out last year and made 40% of its domestic BO after noms. Ditto
American Fiction, but the percentage bumps were even higher. If a movie is already out of theaters, it will be re-released, even if it's already on streaming, to try to take advantage of this.
2) A best picture nominee will hang around with 600+ screens all the way through the weekend of the Oscars. This leads to an unnaturally long tail that a movie would otherwise not get. [Note: Big winners will usually get a 1 or 2 week victory lap in theaters after the Oscars, but this doesn't typically amount to much money.]
Depending on the timing and scope of all of the above, this can add up to $5-$10m more than a movie would have made -- chump change to Disney, lifeblood to indie distributors.
This year looks a little weird. The fires in LA seem to have screwed up the timing of a lot of stuff. Nominations were supposed to come out on Fri, Jan 17, which should naturally lead into increased screens and dollars that first weekend (MLK). But the nominations were delayed almost a week. So movies (rightfully) expecting nominations, like
Anora and
The Substance, surged their screen counts MLK weekend, but didn't have Oscar nominations (yet) to promote. Subsequently, the increases were not as big as I think we would normally expect.
A Complete Unknown is kind of a different case in that it was a wide initial release and still basically on its regular screen trajectory when nominations came out, so it won't get the first kind of boost at all, just the long tail. Given its previous holds, I was thinking it would leg out closer to $80m domestically, but last week was a little worse than I would have expected. We'll see what happens.
deadline.com