It's been a tough year for the "awards movie" business.
There's been no $100 million "Slumdog Millionaire" -- not even a lesser "Juno" or an "Atonement."
In a year where "Avatar," “The Blind Side” and “The Hangover” are lighting up the box office, lost in the dust have been the type of films studios historically have relied upon in the all-important end-of-year Oscar rush.Failing to find an audience: highly anticipated contenders like "The Road," "Nine" and "Invictus."
Indeed, no smaller films released toward the end of 2009 -- whose business models hooked around awards marketing -- have broken out. Certainly none were comparable to last year’s “Slumdog Millionaire” ($377.4 million worldwide) and “Gran Torino” ($269.7 million), or “Juno” ($231.4 million) the year before that.
“For the most part, the nominated dramas have been successful, but not at the level of those,” one studio distribution head told TheWrap.
Yes, this season has included some modest success stories. Paramount’s “Up in the Air,” nominated for a best film drama Golden Globe, has grossed $69.5 million so far on a reported production budget of $25 million. Meanwhile, Lionsgate’s “Precious,” also Golden Globe-nominated for best drama, has grossed $45.2 million on a budget of about $10 million.
And among struggling independents and fast-disappearing studio boutique divisions, there were several dramas released well in advance of awards season that have made both Oscar and box-office noise, specifically Weinstein’s “Inglourious Basterds,” which has grossed $321.9 million globally, according to Box Office Mojo.
But by and large, most of the sophisticated dramas released toward the end of last year have failed.(And that list doesn’t even include Summit's best-picture Oscar contender “The Hurt Locker,” another summer release which has grossed only $16.1 million.)
Meanwhile, a sizable number of heavy dramas released by indies and specialty divisions late in 2009 have bombed.
This includes virtually the entire late-year slate from the Weinstein Company, with “Nine” ($22.4 million in global box-office revenue through Monday), “The Road” ($11.7 million), “A Single Man” ($4.3 million) all failing to catch heat.
For its part, Focus Features, which has wrought such awards-season hits as 2004's "Lost in Tranlation" ($119.7 million), 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain” ($178 million in global box-office) and 2007's "Atonement" ($129.7 million), had one of the bigger flops of the fourth quarter, with “Pirate Radio” taking in just over $8 million on a budget of $50 million.
Focus' Coen Brothers comedy "A Serious Man" hasn't found traction, either, grossing $18.7 million since its Oct. 2 release.
And Fox Searchlight's "Amelia" only grossed $19.2 million on a $40 million budget.All of this comes just two years after Warner Bros. scuttled Warner Independent and Picturehouse, kicking off a wave of specialty-division retrenchment. At the time, studio CEO Alan Horn said Warner's main marketing and distribution personnel were more than equipped to handle the unique needs of sophisticated comedies and adult dramas.
“We decided that, for us, what distinguishes a specialty movie from a big Warners movie isn’t the marketing and distribution -- but the movie itself,” Horn said.
