American Sniper's total box office earnings have now topped $300 million, according to Box Office Mojo. That is a tidy little sum. But, as you know, the amount a movie makes at the box office often bears little relationship to how beloved it is by the critics. Or to how likely a movie is to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Since 1979 - the earliest year for which Box Office Mojo has box office totals for nominees - the winner of the Best Picture Oscar has also been the biggest money-maker among the nominees only one third of the time. That's 12 of the 36 years, starting with Kramer v. Kramer in 1979 and ending with Slumdog Millionaire in 2008. In between, movies like Platoon (1986), Titanic (1997), and The Departed were both box office and Oscar winners.
In the following chart, the red bars denote the money maker among the Oscar best picture nominees, while the gold circle designates the winner.
There's often a big disparity between a film's Oscar and commercial success. In 2009, the Best Picture was The Hurt Locker, which did far, far less in revenue than Avatar. E.T. did phenomenally well in 1982, but the Best Picture was Gandhi.
The necessary caveat: Revenue increases over time. We've stacked the films according to the estimated number of tickets each sold, which is calculated by dividing the box office earnings to the ticket prices at the time. This year's Best Picture nominees are still in theaters, so their ticket totals will grow. In every case here, the Oscar winners and losers saw more money come in after the award was given out - but two-thirds of the time, that wasn't enough to vault the winner into first place in ticket sales.
That may help explain why this year's cumulative sales are so low. Sniper did very well, but most of the other nominees didn't, resulting in one of the lowest ticket totals in almost four decades.
It's worth remembering that pure revenue figures can be misleading. Just based on revenue in dollars, the cumulative earnings of the last 36 years of Best Picture nominees looks like this.
If you calculate ticket sales, as described above, you get the graph at the top. But if you further divide by the number of nominees, the picture looks much more bleak in recent years.
The low was 2005, which featured films like Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Munich. 2005 was also the year that gave us the most derided Best Picture winner in recent memory: Crash. Often, it's worth remembering, the Academy doesn't know any better than the marketplace.
