- This year's batch of Oscar best picture nominees has the biggest box office total since 2009.
- Blockbusters like "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Avatar: The Way of Water" were nominated.
This year's Oscar nominations were announced on Tuesday, and blockbuster movies like "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Avatar: The Way of Water" — the top two biggest movies of 2022 — are in the best-picture race. Other populist picks, like the indie darling "Everything Everywhere All at Once," were also nominated.
These films help make this year's batch of best-picture nominees the group with the highest total box-office gross since 2009 — the year that the biggest movie of all time, the first "Avatar," was released and nabbed a best-picture nomination.
As of Tuesday, this year's 10 nominees totaled $1.57 billion in North America. And with "The Way of Water" showing no signs of slowing down and some nominated movies being re-released to theaters, that number will increase.
The 2009 group totaled $1.74 billion at the North American box office. In the 13 years since, just a handful of best-picture classes have surpassed the $1 billion mark.
There are, of course, caveats.
Streaming movies have been in contention in recent years, starting in 2018 with Netflix's "Roma," and the companies behind them — which have also included Amazon and Apple — give their movies very short theatrical releases and don't release box-office figures.
The pandemic also devastated the theatrical industry in 2020 and 2021, and the box office for the nominees those years reflect this.
Plus, since 2009, the Oscars have gone from 10 best picture nominees, to between five and 10, and since last year, back to a full 10.
This year's nominations come after criticisms that the Oscars of recent years didn't recognize enough box-office hits, an assessment that's been heightened by the telecast's dwindling ratings. The last two telecasts have had the worst ratings in the show's history.
The decreasing viewership for the live telecast has raised questions — and anxiety — over what the Oscars can do to attract a bigger audience. The voting body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, even announced a "popular Oscar" in 2018, but quickly scrapped the idea after backlash.
To be fair, the Oscars have recognized other blockbusters in the past 13 years, such as "American Sniper" in 2014, "Black Panther" in 2018, and "Joker" in 2019.
And this year shows that the Oscars, with its expanded crop of 10 contenders, can recognize a diverse selection of movies in a given year, from small-budget arthouse films to widely seen crowd pleasers. Whether that translates to more eyeballs remains to be seen.
The chart below shows the North American box-office totals for each group of best picture nominees since 2009.
And here is the top-grossing best picture nominee of each of those years at the North American box office, according to Box Office Mojo:
- 2009: "Avatar" — $750 million
- 2010: "Toy Story 3" — $415 million
- 2011: "The Help" — $170 million
- 2012: "Lincoln" — $182 million
- 2013: "Gravity" — $274 million
- 2014: "American Sniper" — $350 million
- 2015: "The Martian" — $228 million
- 2016: "Hidden Figures" — $170 million
- 2017: "Dunkirk" — $188 million
- 2018: "Black Panther" — $700 million
- 2019: "Joker" — $335 million
- 2020: "Promising Young Woman" — $6 million
- 2021: "Dune" — $108 million
- 2022: "Top Gun: Maverick" — $718 million
It deserves to be said that none of these movies actually won Oscars' top prize. The biggest movie of a given year hasn't won best picture since "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" in 2003. Can "Top Gun: Maverick" break the streak?