Oscar Contenders Are Struggling at The Box-Office

If “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Elvis” proved that Americans would visit movie theaters again following the lockdowns, that still didn’t automatically equate to audiences flocking to see more mature dramas and the Oscar-bait films that often draw critical praise.

This fall we’ve seen the dire state the arthouse is currently in. Awards season might be fully underway, but it’s been faring terribly at the box office, weekend after weekend.

Consider:

• “Tar” – $4.2 million

• “Armageddon Time“ – $1.3 million

• “The Banshees of Inisherin“ – $4.6 million

• “Triangle of Sadness” – $3.2 million

• “Till” – $7.4 million

• “Aftersun” — $328,000

“Decision to Leave” seems to be the exception as it is doing fairly well, at least for a foreign-language release. When all is said and done, it might crack the $2 million mark. Nothing phenomenal, but a welcome semi-hit for newcomer MUBI.

However, when you compare the domestic intake of these Oscar movies to “Terrifier 2,” a film with a micro-budget of less than 500,000 dollars, it’s damn near embarrassing. “Terrifier 2" has so far made close to $10 million domestically. None of the above Oscar movies will come close to that total.

It’ll be interesting to see how the following titles fare in the coming weeks, although I’m not holding my breath that they will break the bank: “The Fabelmans,” “She Said,” “Bardo,” “Babylon,” “Women Talking,” and “The Whale.”

“The Fabelmans” will go wide in a few weeks, and it’s currently tracking at an opening of around $6-7 million dollars. Not earth-shattering, but also not terrible for this kind of movie. It does stand the best chance out of the remaining titles to do well. However, a major red flag is that Spielberg’s last film, “West Side Story,” bombed at the box office with just $38 million grossed domestically on a $100 million budget.

As studios are hysterically looking for answers to these miserable numbers, the obvious has been right in front of them this entire time. During these last three years, the pandemic forced studios to stream much of their new content. Many moviegoers realized just how much more comfortable, and less headache-inducing, it was to stream than to head to the local cineplex.

The number of mature moviegoers buying tickets is severely down, and streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon are making people stay at home instead of churning out their hard-earned money for overpriced parking, popcorn and movie tickets.

It's a no-brainer decision for many: Why go through all that effort to watch a movie when you can just stay in, save money, and not endure any of the annoyances that come with watching a movie in public (texting, talking, ads). 

That is unless, of course, an irresistible arthouse film gets released, but we haven’t gotten such a movie this year. Now, it seems, you need a top-tier filmmaker at the helm for an arthouse film to garner any success, someone like Scorsese, Coen, Fincher, Wes Anderson, PTA or Tarantino. The problem is that you can count these types of filmmakers on just two hands.