by Nathaniel R
Ah.... statue lust. It invariably shoves everything into the last two months of the year. This just in: Focus has pushed back both of its key contenders this year: Boy Erased, the gay conversion drama, is moving the beginning of its platform release from September 28th until November 2nd and On the Basis of Sex, the biopic on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is moving its limited launch from November 9th until December 25th. Though pushing back a little seems kind of wise for On the Basis of Sex (put a little distance between yourself and RBG) Christmas seems like a step too far. Or is that just me?
We expect a few more Oscar contenders to push back into December. Why? Well, despite statistics being in favor of releasing in October or November if you'd like to win e-- The Shape of Water (2017) was actually the first Best Picture winner to begin its release in December since Million Dollar Baby (2004) -- common beliefs are hard to shake and Hollywood has long viewed a December berth as the be-all and end-all of awards strategies. There is a good reason for that though we hate to admit it: despite December being tough for Best Picture wins in the modern era (momentum needed!) it is and basically always has been easier to get nominations if you release in December. Try to imagine, say, The Post, being nominated last year had it come out in September. It doesn't happen. But in December it had so much pre-release hype as an assumed frontrunner that it was able to weather lukewarm precursor attention and snag the nod.
Wings (1927) the first best picture winner. It still holds up. For fun here's a list of when every Best Picture ever first opened in theaters excluding festival debuts obviously. (Some of the dates are a bit fuzzy, of course, that's especially true for ye olden times when listings are harder to come by and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between event premieres and the actual beginning of a platform release...
BEST PICTURE WINNERS with OPENING DATES
- Wings (1927/1928) - August 12th
- The Broadway Melody (1928/1929) June 12th
- All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/1930) April 21st
- Cimarron (1930/1931) - February 9th
- Grand Hotel (1931/1932) - April 12th
- Cavalcade (1932/1933) - April 15th
Oscar then moves to the full calendar year for its eligibility rules. From here forward the ceremonies take place in February or March (but in those first six years they were all over the place in terms of timing.)
- It Happened One Night (1934) - February 22nd
- Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) - November 8th
Best Picture sizes are still in flux and varying each year at this point but with the addition of the Supporting categories, 5 becomes the annual no-exceptions size of the acting categories. - The Great Ziegfeld (1936) -September 4th
- The Life of Emile Zola (1937) - August 11th
- You Can't Take It With You (1938) - September 1st
- Gone With the Wind (1939) - December 15th (though it didn't reach people outside Georgia, NY, and LA until January 1940)
- Rebecca (1940) - April 12th
- How Green Was My Valley (1941) - October 28th
- Mrs Miniver (1942) - June 4th
- Casablanca (1943) - January 23rd
The Academy moves to the 5 Best Picture nominee tradition after 16 early years with lots of different category sizes (and not just in Best Picture) - Going My Way (1944) - May 3rd
- The Lost Weekend (1945) - November 29th
- The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) - November 21st
- Gentleman's Agreement (1947) - November 11th
- Hamlet (1948) - September 29th
- All the King's Men (1949) - November 8th
- All About Eve (1950) - October 13th
- An American in Paris (1951) - November 11th
- The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) - January 10th
- From Here to Eternity (1953) - August 5th
- On the Waterfront (1954) - July 28th
- Marty (1955) - April 11th
- Around the World in 80 Days (1956) - October 17th
- The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - December 14th
Gigi begins an astonishing run for the movie musical (in terms of Oscar. 5 Musicals will win from 1958-1968
Around about this time April becomes the dominant month in which to hold Oscar ceremonies (April stays in power for a long time) - Gigi (1958) - May 15th
- Ben-Hur (1959) - November 18th
- The Apartment (1960) - June 15th
- West Side Story (1961) - October 18th
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - December 10th
- Tom Jones (1963) - October 6th
- My Fair Lady (1964) - October 21st
- The Sound of Music (1965) - March 2nd
- A Man For All Seasons (1966) - December 12th
- In the Heat of the Night (1967) - August 2nd
- Oliver! (1968) - December 10th
- Midnight Cowboy (1969) - May 25th
- Patton (1970) - February 4th
- The French Connection (1971) - October 9th
- The Godfather (1972) - March 24th
- The Sting (1973) - December 25th (the first Christmas day release to win!)
- The Godfather Part II (1974) - December 12th
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - November 19th
- Rocky (1976) - November 21st
- Annie Hall (1977) - April 20th
- The Deer Hunter (1978) - December 8th... but it took a long time to reach general public as it didn't go wide until February 23rd
- Kramer Vs Kramer (1979) - December 19th
- Ordinary People (1980) - September 19th
Around about this time late March becomes the dominant time to hold the ceremony - Chariots of Fire (1981) - September 25th... but one of the turning points, we'd wager in the awful soon to be popular thing of making regular audiences wait until the Oscars to see it. It wasn't really wide until April 9th AFTER it won Best Picture. Boo! Boo! We say.
- Gandhi (1982) - December 10th
- Terms of Endearment (1983) - November 23rd
- Amadeus (1984) - September 19th
Out of Africa kicks off 2 plus decades of "Oscar has no memory" complaints -- so many December winners from 1985 through 2002!
Not sure what happened but right around this time The Academy gets VERY December focused and the only disruptions come from Summer releases. - Out of Africa (1985) - December 18th
- Platoon (1986) - December 19th
- The Last Emperor (1987) - December 18th
- Rain Man (1988) - December 16th
- Driving Miss Daisy (1989) - December 15th
- Dances With Wolves (1990) - November 9th
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - February 14th --yes it was released before the previous year's Oscars were even held.
- Unforgiven (1992) - August 3rd
- Schindler's List (1993) - December 15th
- Forrest Gump (1994) - July 6th
- Braveheart (1995) - May 24th
- The English Patient (1996) - November 15th
- Titanic (1997) - December 19th
- Shakespeare in Love (1998) - December 3rd
- American Beauty (1999) - September 15th
- Gladiator (2000) - May 5th
- A Beautiful Mind (2001) - December 21st
- Chicago (2002) - December 10th
Late February becomes the new norm for Best Picture ceremonies with occasional first week of March ceremonies. At about this time it becomes harder to win when waiting for December to show yourself to the world. - The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003) - December 17th
- Million Dollar Baby (2004) - December 15th
- Crash (2005) - May 6th
- The Departed (2006) - October 6th
- No Country For Old Men (2007) - November 9th
- Slumdog Millionaire (2008) - November 12th
The expanded Best Picture nomination era rules begin
The Academy changes the Best Picture system from 5 to 10 nominees for Best Picture after years of outcries about blockbusters and genre pictures being shut out in favor of indies and dramas. - The Hurt Locker (2009) - June 26th
- The King's Speech (2010) - November 26th
The Academy changes the system once again. Now Best Picture is 5-10 nominees depending on whether a film receives a threshold percentage of #1 votes. It's mathematically possible in this system to have anywhere from 5 to 10 nominees but there have, to date, been no years that were not either 8 or 9 nominees wide, with 9 being far more common (only 2 of the 7 years under this system have had Best Picture shortlists that totalled 8 films). - The Artist (2011) - November 25th
- Argo (2012) - October 12th
- 12 Years a Slave (2013) - October 18th
- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) - October 17th
- Spotlight (2015) -November 6th
- Moonlight (2016) - October 21st
- The Shape of Water (2017) - December 1st
- ???? (2018) -????
So when's the best time to release a Best Picture winner?
Well obviously it depends on the film itself. Sometimes December is your only option towards a nomination (No way does, like, The Post get nominated last year without that late year release) but winning is different. Statistically...
Of all the Academy's Best Picture winners throughout history 23 have been released in December, 17 in November, and 12 in October (by far the three most popular months accounting for 57% of all Best Picture wins). The most troublesome time to release a Best Picture hopeful? That's January or March (i.e. when the previous year's Best Picture race is still in full swing), and perhaps oddly July; only twice in history have each of those months produced winners.
If you restrict it to just the modern Best Picture era which we'd argue is smarter because we don't live in the 1950s or 1980s or whatnot, things are different. We'd argue that the modern Best Picture era begins around 2003. That's when the ceremony committed to being earlier and soon the rules themselves were totally in flux and between 2009 and 2011 they experimented and came up with a whole new set of Best Picture rules. If you stay in that spread of years (2003-2017) the stats are different and suggest that October and November are by far your best bets; together they account for 66% of the wins in this new era.
AND AS A REMINDER
Here's the current schedule of Oscar hopefuls this coming fall.
SEPTEMBER
This month feels mostly empty this year (missed opportunity?) but for the following films which aren't really expected to be in Oscar play but you never know.
14th The Children Act, White Boy Rick
21st Life Itself
28th Old Man and the Gun
OCTOBER
If A Star is Born, Beautiful Boy, and First Man all deliver they could dig in deep as LOCKED-UP NOMINEES which helps a lot in the noise noise and more noise of Oscar race. You can become hard to shove aside if you entrench your position! The only drawback, nervous distributors might counter, is that you don't feel as "fresh" when it comes time to pick winners.
5th A Star is Born
12th Beautiful Boy, First Man, What They Had
19th Can You Ever Forgive Me, Mowgli
NOVEMBER
Crowded but a potentially great placement for Widows in particular.
2nd Bohemian Rhapsody, Boy Erased, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, Suspiria
9th Peterloo
16th Fantastic Beasts 2, Widows
21st Creed II, Wreck-It Ralph 2
23rd The Favourite
DECEMBER
All of these films below plan to come out PLUS likely any last minute beloveds that reveal themselves at the fall festivals and then scramble for a date. Movies that have yet to announce dates include but are not limited to: If Beale Street Could Talk, Everybody Knows, The Sisters Brothers, The Best of Enemies, At Eternity's Gate, Gloria, Red Joan and The Aftermath
5th Capernaum (Lebanon's assumed Oscar entry)
7th Mary Queen of Scots, Under the Silver Lake
14th Backseat, Mortal Engines
21st Alita Battle Angel, Aquaman, Cold War (Poland's assumed Oscar entry), and Welcome to Marwen
25th Mary Poppins Returns, On the Basis of Sex
YES YES I KNOW I NEED TO UPDATE THE OSCAR CHARTS THIS WEEK. ON IT VERY SOON.