There isn't an Academy Awards Best Picture nominee among the five top-grossing films of the year, and that's actually a bit unusual.
It's typically about par for the Academy to leave top-grossing films out of Best Picture contention, but the last few years have tweaked that notion a bit. In 2014, the highest-grossing film in the land - American Sniper and its $350 million take - found itself among the Best Picture crowd. In 2013, Alfonso Cuaron's visually immersive Gravity took in more than $200 million in the U.S. alone and cracked the Top 5 at year's end.
However, as we mentioned before, there's typically a huge disparity between the Best Picture nominees and those at the top of the box office earning list or on the guest list at the People's Choice Awards. Since the Oscars were first handed out in 1929, the most popular movie in the country has won Best Picture just 18 times. In the past 40 years, the only box office champions to break through to the Academy voters were The Godfather (1972), Rocky (1974), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Rain Man (1988), Forrest Gump (1994), Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). That's right, it's been more than a decade since the last time it happened and the gap hasn't closed much since.
Statistician William Briggs checked box office receipts and found that, since 1940, 17 Best Picture winners made 25% or less of the haul of that year's highest-grossing pictures. It's happened six times in the past decade: Shrek 2's $441 million overshadowed Million Dollar Baby's $100 million in 2004, the final Star Wars prequel installment's $380 million dwarfed Crash's $54 million in 2005, Spider-Man 3 trounced No Country For Old Men by $336 million to $74 million, while the record $750 million raked in by 3-D spectacle Avatar in 2009 more than quadrupled The Hurt Locker's $17 million take in its opening weekend alone. In 2011, the $381 million made by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone blew away the scant $44 million made by black-and-white, silent Best Picture winner The Artist. The 5 million made in the U.S. by 2012 Best Picture winner Argo was nowhere close to that year's top-grossing superhero hit The Avengers, which took in a whopping 3 million stateside. Much as 12 Years A Slave's .7 million was dwarfed by Hunger Games: Catching Fire's 4.7 million and Birdman's .3 million didn't stack up to American Sniper's take, this year's canyon between top earners and Best Picture looks just as vast.
To give you some idea of the real estate separating Best Picture nominees from box office reality, we've listed the Top 8 highest-grossing films of 2015 and paired them with a corresponding Best Picture nominee. To illustrate just how broad the spectrum was last year, the top-grossing film's take was 90 times that of the lowest-grossing Best Picture nominee. Here are even more examples of the growing divide between moviegoing Americans:
8. The Martian
Studio: 20th Century Fox
2015 U.S. box office take: 7.9 million
Oscar No. 8. Room
Studio: A24
2015 U.S. box office take: .9 million
The Matt Damon-led adaptation of Andy Weir's 2011 book is the only Best Picture nominee to crack the Top 8, but it still isn't exactly indicative of Oscar's populism.
This Ridley Scott production only made a quarter of the No. 1 film's box office take despite packing the cast with Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels and Kate Mara. Even if you throw its total box office take in with those of the other Best Picture nominees, that $589.1 million would have only been good enough for third place in 2015.
The divide only widens when you consider that the counterpart to NASA's “leave no man behind” story involves a woman being raped on a daily basis and confined with her son to a shed by her ex husband. Yes, the “room” in this Irish-Canadian drama is not only this woman's personal hell, but the wall between her son and the outside world. It's Netflix's The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt with exactly none of the humor and far more dire consequences for Brie Larson's protagonist. It also isn't the last time the Academy gives filmmakers kudos for putting women and children in serious jeopardy this year.
