Conventional wisdom suggests that studios should not open their newest movies or tentpoles on Oscars weekend. Wouldn’t you rather wait until the weekend after the industry has finished celebrating the year’s best movies before promoting a new one?
But historically, that hasn’t necessarily been the case, especially when compared to something like Super Bowl weekend. So, with studios largely avoiding major new releases, this weekend had the unfortunate effect of being the lowest weekend at the overall domestic box office during the Oscars in at least 15 years.
Seems like the real winners were onstage on Sunday. The widest release from a major distributor this week was “Last Breath,” the deep-sea diver thriller starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu. It opened on over 3,000 theaters and pulled in $7.8 million, finishing No. 2 in the domestic top 10 behind “Captain America: Brave New World” in its third week of release. It made another $15 million this weekend and now has $163.6 million domestic.
“Last Breath” headlined a surprisingly weak turnout across the board, in which the overall take was just an estimated $53.3 million. Through Sunday, the year-to-date overall domestic box office is $1.08 billion, which is still 11 percent ahead of pace from 2024, so a stinker of a week is not the end of the world.
But if you compare this weekend to past years when the Oscars were held, that $53.3 million is the lowest overall take since at least 2010 (quite easily longer), according to data via Comscore. That includes the COVID weekend of April 23, 2021, in which the overall box office draw was $57.2 million as headlined by “Mortal Kombat,” which opened to $23.4 million. 2020’s Oscars fortunately took place prior to the COVID pandemic shutting everything down, taking place earlier in the year than usual on February 7.
It doesn’t help that some of the smaller platform releases struggled, too. The critical darling “My Dead Friend Zoe” from Briarcliff Entertainment managed just $755,000 from its opening on 780 screens. And the GKIDS anime “Mobile Suit Gundam GquuuuuX – Beginning” made $916,664. Utopia’s “The Accidental Getaway Driver” was a bright spot on just four screens, earning $41,000 and a hefty per-screen-average.
“With the year-to-date box office running around 11 percent ahead of last year at this point, we can afford a lackluster Oscar weekend in theaters, and with some huge movies on the horizon, the year will get jumpstarted soon enough,” senior Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian told IndieWire, citing movies like “Snow White” and “Mickey 17” opening in March.
Not all Oscars weekends are created equal, as unlike the Super Bowl, the date fluctuates, sometimes to late or early March, and other times into February. But many of the No. 1 movies in those given weeks were also larger studio fare and some major sequels or franchise titles, including “Kung Fu Panda 4” (2024), “Scream VI” (2023), “The Lost City” (2022), “Birds of Prey” (2020), “Get Out” (2017), and “Alice in Wonderland” (2010).
And yet most Oscars weekends, even if there are some notable new titles, find themselves down overall compared to the week prior. In 2015, the Oscars weekend overall haul dropped by 80 percent after “50 Shades of Grey” opened big, though it repeated as the No. 1 movie of the week. This weekend saw a dip of 54 percent from the week of February 21-23, when the biggest new release was “The Monkey.”
The disappointing week at the box office comes after Best Director winner Sean Baker for the night’s Best Picture winner “Anora” made a plea for audiences to see more movies in theaters and for studios to continue making theatrical releases. Baker’s Oscar winner, with $41 million globally and just $15.4 million domestic, sadly ranks among the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners in the last 25 years, just ahead of “Nomadland” during the pandemic ($38 million global) and just behind “The Hurt Locker” ($49 million).
The good news is that a few Oscar contenders still did some business in theaters this weekend. “A Complete Unknown,” “The Brutalist,” “Wicked,” and “Conclave” all added screens and saw some healthy Oscars bumps, as did the Brazilian Oscar winner “I’m Still Here,” which lost 250 locations but still went up 38 percent from last week. It has a domestic haul of $5.2 million.