Scott Cooper, Jeff Bridges on the Crazy Heart set (top); Nick Saban, Tim McGraw, Lily Collins, Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side (middle); Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (bottom)
Crazy Heart, The Blind Side, and The Hurt Locker have all been helped at the domestic box office following their Oscar victories on March 7. Crazy Heart earned Jeff Bridges a Best Actor Oscar; The Blind Side earned Sandra Bullock a Best Actress Oscar; while the Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker won a total of six statuettes including Best Picture, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow), and Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal).
This past weekend, John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side took in $1.8 million at 369 screens in 11 markets for an overseas total to date of $10.3 million. By the end of its run, The Blind Side will be one movie to have done infinitely better domestically than internationally. Part of the reason may be that Sandra Bullock isn't as much a box-office draw overseas as she is in the United States; also, despite its Best Actress Oscar win, the family drama may be much too "suburban USA" for non-American tastes.
Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart drew $882,000 from 459 screens in 21 markets. International total to date: $3.9 million. Country music and Jeff Bridges aren't exactly major box-office draws anywhere in the world, especially outside the United States. But the Oscars did help. Else, you can be sure that Crazy Heart — in addition to The Blind Side and The Hurt Locker — would have fared much worse overseas.
The Hurt Locker, in fact, grossed an impressive $580K in Australia for a total of $2.5 million.
Source for international box-office figures: The Hollywood Reporter
Photos: The Hurt Locker (Jonathan Olley / Summit Entertainment); Crazy Heart (Lorey Sebastian / 20th Century Fox); The Blind Side (Ralph Nelson / Warner Bros.)
Maybe those Oscar movies will perform better on dvd overseas?