Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster Titanic
Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire received a phenomenal boost during the year-end awards season, especially as a result of its eight Academy Award nominations and subsequent eight wins. Fourteen Oscar nods and eleven wins certainly didn't hurt James Cameron's Titanic, either, while Rob Marshall's musical Chicago collected nearly two-thirds of its grosses and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby amassed more than 90 percent of its income after they were nominated for, respectively, thirteen and seven Academy Awards, according to figures found at Hollywood.com.
The Hollywood.com Oscar's Box-Office Bump chart includes the last ten Best Picture winners, showing the amount they earned before and after the Academy Award nominations were announced. Obviously, movies that were released earlier in the year, e.g., Joel and Ethan Coen' No Country for Old Men and Martin Scorsese's The Departed, benefited less from the Oscar publicity in North America — though in all probability the Oscars helped out overseas, where movies oftentimes open at later dates, and with ancillary revenues (DVDs, pay-per-view, etc.).
It's also important to remember that some of those movies — Titanic, which opened near the end of 1997, comes to mind — would have made a lot of money with or without multiple Oscar nominations. So, exactly how much the Oscars themselves influenced a film's box office is open to debate.
In order to find out, you'd probably have to see if there was a significant box-office surge following the Oscar announcements, while taking into account the number of theaters screening the film in question. Some movies open in limited release, only to go wide once the Oscar nominations are announced. This year, that was the case with a handful of Oscar nominees, with Crazy Heart as the chief benefactor of that strategy.
Photo: 20th Century Fox
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