Oscar Season Reflections

Oscar noms are out, officially cementing the close of the 2025 film release schedule. The limited awards expansions have wrapped now that we're into February. Things we may have missed are available to stream or rent at home.

We can now reflect on what was a pretty decent year for film, even if the overall Box Office performance for the year was not all Hollywood had hoped.

Thoughts on the Year:

2024 was the post-strike year. Coming off of 2022, the post-covid year, and 2023, a solid recovery year that ended in two disastrous strikes for the industry. Because of this, forecasts for 2024 shifted down as the studios pushed large tentpoles back and shifted their entire schedules to accommodate. What was supposed to happen is 2025 was a rebound/return to normalcy year with many initial forecasts expecting large gains over the emptier slate of 2024. Instead, we saw domestic receipts grow 1% or roughly $80M total. A paltry gain that is well below the CPI inflation rate in any normal year.

Horror Scared Up $$$:

There were still some interesting things to track, including trends like the best Box Office year of all time for the Horror genre, with over $1.1B, or nearly 13% of all domestic grosses attached to the genre. We now also have several of those frightful breakout hits influencing awards season. Aside from the obvious, and very Awards relevant "Sinners," we saw breakout, surprise performances from "Final Destination: Bloodlines," "Weapons," and "The Conjuring: Last Rites."

We saw very solid performances from many, many mid-tier to low-budget horror films as well including "The Black Phone 2" which proved to be a sorely needed hit for the Blumhouse label after an uncharacteristically poor stretch. "Five Nights at Freddy's 2" continued the trend, not by besting its predecessor, but by overcoming some very concerning early tracking to put up a respectable $120M+ domestic entirely in December (why this didn't release during an empty Halloween weekend for new releases I will never understand).

"Together" and "The Monkey" put up some very respectable numbers for Neon, grossing nearly $40M and just over $20M, respectively. Neon has consistently taken risks with indie horror, giving small-budget films wide release windows and decent marketing budgets with success. Though they haven't been able to repeat 2024's "Longlegs," yet, they seem to be finding ways to turn a profit.

No More Bad Tentpoles:

We saw several wake-up calls for Hollywood execs as well. Poorly made tentpoles with a big marketing push are dead. And execs who don't realize it will be a thing of the past soon, too, if they haven't been axed already.

If you don't have a beloved immediate predecessor OR a solid (ideally excellent) reception from critics and audiences, you're not going to make a profit in today's environment. Nightmarish box-office performances from "Snow White" and "Tron: Ares," both coincidentally from Disney, prove that taking the extra time and energy to produce top-quality films (starting with top quality scripts) is even more important than a top-tier marketing campaign to drive butts to seats.

"Elio," Pixar's latest, is showing real cracks forming for the brand despite the overperformance of "Inside Out 2" last summer. "Elio" is by far the lowest-grossing Pixar movie, not influenced by the Pandemic-era (not released on streaming or impacted by Covid in general, like Onward's March 6th, 2020 release certainly was), bringing in just $72M, well under recent bomb, "Lightyear" at $118M. Disney overall obviously had a mixed year, but non-Pixar fare like the live action "Lilo & Stitch" and the animated "Zootopia 2" really have saved the day for the mouse house in 2025. They now represent the 2nd and 3rd highest-grossing movies of 2025.

"Avatar: Fire & Ash" (also Disney) has taken a huge step back from the sensational, record-shattering performances of "Avatar" and "Avatar: The Way of Water". This is not a shock, but it is worth watching. I do expect a 4th "Avatar" film still, but if it's another rehash of the prior 3, as "Fire & Ash" seemed to be a rehash of the first two, watch out. That could bring the franchise crashing down before James Cameron's planned conclusion with part 5.

It's too easy to sit at home and watch other things when a mid-to-low quality sequel or reboot hits theaters. "Karate-Kid: Legends" was an abject failure for Sony in a great Summer release frame, with just a $52M domestic take, and that's despite the overwhelming success of Netflix's "Cobra Kai" bringing Ralph Macchio and the franchise back to relevance.

"Ballerina" had to play up its "John Wick" connection everywhere, from its title ("From the World of John Wick: Ballerina" is the actual official title of the film. It was on the schedule simply as "Ballerina" until April or May of 2025, signaling Lionsgate catching the awareness issue just before release), to Keanu Reeves 5 minutes of screen time being featured in all trailers just to muster a barely respectable, but underwhelming $58M domestic take. "The Running Man" reboot came out swinging with a fun trailer, a perfect leading man in Glen Powell, an excellent director in Edgar Wright, and a phenomenal supporting cast. It also featured a massive marketing push from Paramount and couldn't even crack $40M domestically. The accounting work on this one is going to be brutal. If it's only vaguely wanted by audiences and it receives a lukewarm reception, you're done in today's market.

Non-Tentpole? Still Problems.

Other missteps impacted 2025's ability to be the post-COVID, post-strike box-office comeback year. As mentioned, it wasn't, we're still sub-pre-COVID numbers, and 2026 does not look to reverse this anemic recovery trend. A promising marketing campaign and initial tracking numbers came out for the football horror original "Him", with Jordan Peele's name all over the campaign as a producer. This looked like it could break through. And then... the Rotten Tomatoes score came out in the 30s, and it was dead on arrival. After looking like a $20M+ opener, the film opened to $13M, and couldn't even double that during its domestic run. Closing with just $25M, likely not even covering its own marketing expenses, let alone its budget. The poorly received "M3GAN 2.0", sequel to the surprise, early 2023 hit, could only muster $24M domestically while its predecessor finaled at $95M.

Conversely, releasing a good film that doesn't seem to be big enough or great enough to see in the theater led to some real duds domestically as well. The phenomenal "Mickey 17" earlier this year was a big loser for Warner Bros just before their miraculous box-office streak began with "Minecraft" a few weeks later. "Caught Stealing" was a big loser for Sony with under $20M domestically despite a hot star, a marquee filmmaker, great reviews, and a big marketing push.

In the age of streaming, we still have a relatively popular group of Best Picture nominees, and this is despite some obscure and foreign-language fare making the cut. If we subtract out our two Netflix-produced box-office zeroes, we're left with 8 films that had an average domestic take of ~$84M at the box office. Still, only one of the top 10 and two of the top 20 grossers of 2025 made the Best Picture cut. Less than the Academy likely hopes in the era of nominee expansion for this category.

I'm going to do a quick roundup of the key Oscar Nominees below, including all of the Best Picture nominees. Over the next couple of weeks, I should be posting some additional articles on 2025 film trends and some of the trends we continue to see from the tier 2 distributors like A24 and Neon, who continue to have strong awards season showings this year.

And the nominees for Best Picture are:

Bugonia - WATCHLIST

F1 - 7/10 (reviewed)

Frankenstein - 6/10 (reviewed)

Hamnet - 9/10 (reviewed)

Marty Supreme - 4/10 (reviewed)

One Battle After Another - 10/10 (reviewed)

The Secret Agent - 7/10 (reviewed)

Sentimental Value - 7.5/10 (reviewed)

Sinners - 8/10:

"Sinners" has been in the zeitgeist for quite some time with a release way back in April, so I will not spend much time here. It's a very good take on the Vampire genre that interweaves the Black southern experience in the Jim Crow era. If you haven't seen it, you should. Did I think it was the greatest original Hollywood movie of the last several years? Probably not. Am I thrilled it did well and is getting some acknowledgement? Yes.

My prediction on Oscar night for "Sinners" is some technical wins and not much else, despite the record nomination count. It feels like the player sitting at the poker table that has the 2nd or 3rd best hand in every category. Ryan Coogler is now one of the top filmmaker names in Hollywood, and I expect he will be back down the road with additional Awards worthy fare. Looking forward to it!

Train Dreams - WATCHLIST

Additional Notable Nominees:

Best Actress - Rose Byrne - "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" - 3/10 (reviewed)

Best Animated Feature & Best Original Song - KPop: Demon Hunters - 8.5/10:

Only a demon could hate this movie. I'll keep this brief because you've probably already seen this Netflix sensation. Totally original and engaging animation style. Great music. "KPop" is a blast. If you haven't seen it, you should.

Notable Snubs:

Best International Film - No Other Choice - 7.5/10 (reviewed)

Best Original Screenplay, Director, Picture - Weapons - 8.5/10 (reviewed)

So first, "Weapons" does have one very deserving nomination, and that is for Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan, who steals the show in "Weapons" as Gladys. I was not necessarily expecting "Weapons" to dominate awards season this year, but I did think it had a decent shot at an Original Screenplay nod to pair with Madigan's success. Even some more technical categories, where it sees no acknowledgement, like Makeup, Cinematography, and Film Editing, felt plausible.

In the era of up-to 10 Best Picture nominees, I also thought it had an outside chance there this year. "Sinners" was always the Hollywood horror shoo-in for awards season, but "Weapons" was the dark horse. I do think that without so much genre film representation in the major categories this year, a film like "Weapons" that so overperformed with critics and audiences in a late Summer release window would often get more love during awards season, but in a year like 2025 with multiple other creepy films represented, it's a tougher sell.

Best Original Screenplay, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor - Jay Kelly - 7/10

Like its subject, perhaps the film "Jay Kelly" was a little overconfident in its awards season prospects. This was made to be Oscar bait, and instead it is undercut by a tiny film about the film world that is almost entirely in Norwegian ("Sentimental Value," which received a whopping 9 nominations). I genuinely enjoyed "Jay Kelly", even if it didn't have a whole lot of new things to say.

George Clooney is surprisingly self-deprecating and revealing in this part, playing someone who is not entirely based on him, but imagining anyone else working today trying to take on this role is not really possible. Maybe DiCaprio in 10 years? Sandler is really the bright spot of "Kelly", and it's unfortunate to see him snubbed. This is maybe Sandler's most straight dramatic part. He's not doing anything fancy or shticky here at all. He's just playing Kelly's manager, Ron, an overworked, generally good family man, who is just trying to do right by his difficult man-child of a long-term client.

All this said, do there really need to be more movies about movies? No, of course not. There are already too many of these Hollywood "circle jerks" to go around. Let's make more films about regular people. I can't say I'm overly sad to see "Kelly" entirely out in the cold at Oscar season despite a very buzzy initial Netflix launch. Not literally everything Baumbach does is required to be nominated for every award every Oscars. Thank you, Academy, for being genuine and nominating the films you felt deserved to be called out, and not showering the latest release by directors who have won your praises in the past with universal acclaim. But, if I had my vote, we would have found room just for Sandler to get some love for Best Supporting Actor, even though I don't think he'd have any chance of actually winning this year.

Best Production Design, Costume Design, Supporting Actress, Original Song - Wicked: For Good - 4/10:

Is it a snub when it's a bad film? Maybe. Is it even a truly bad film if it's a faithful adaptation? That's always a challenging question, but I tend to think the filmmakers should know what to tweak to make things work for the screen. Last year's "Wicked" worked surprisingly well. Far better than I expected.

An excellent adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, after Hollywood had nearly abandoned the genre for tentpole releases for a decade. I'm told all huge fans of the play (I am an "I saw it one time" person. Not a huge musical guy.) knew Part II would not be that great. "Wicked," the play, had a notoriously large writing quality drop-off from first act to second act, with the huge send-off for intermission of "Defying Gravity" acting as a clear defining climax for the entire play.

This also proved to be an excellent send-off for the first film. At least for me, it also incorrectly set expectations for part II rather high. This was a poor calculation and what I saw instead was probably largely poor source material now just being adapted to the screen following an excellent adaptation of great source material. Still, I'm a bit surprised after "Wicked" was universally adored by fans and Hollywood alike to see "For Good" entirely left out in the cold by the Academy.

In Conclusion:

If I could summarize a prediction for the Academy Awards in one sentence, it would be this:

It's "One Battle After Another's" world; every other film is just living in it.

This is going to look a lot like "Anora's" big night last year for "One Battle." It will win nearly all major categories it's nominated for, including:

Best Picture

Best Director

Best Adapted Screenplay

Best Supporting Actor

Best Film Editing

I am far less certain about the prospects of the other technical categories, like say Cinematography, where I do think "Sinners" has a great shot. I am not certain that Leo has a real chance for Best Actor this year from the trajectory of Awards season thus far; it's leaning toward Chalamet right now. Best Supporting Actress feels completely open to me.

But those core, Screenplay, Picture, and Director awards feel like locks right now. Anything else winning would be an upset. Supporting Actor, to me, the two best Supporting Actor noms to bet on are BOTH from OBAA. So it's more of a toss-up of the favorite, Penn, vs a potential upset, Del Toro. OBAA wins either way. For editing, not only are a complex web of stories interwoven seamlessly here, there are some incredible individual sequences . The balancing of multiple timelines here is masterfully executed, and that is one of the only technical awards I'm going to go out on a limb and hand to a particular film.

"One Battle" will be king this year at the Oscars. Marking one of the very few times the Oscars and I will be in total agreement on the Best Picture of the year (In recent times, 2009 with "The Hurt Locker" and 2023 with "Oppenheimer" are the only examples where this also occurred). And it could literally not be a more relevant choice. I don't know that we've ever seen a film go from interesting/recently topical at production time, to wildly relevant at release, to touching on an exposed, tender societal nerve at awards season before. OBAA may not just go down as the movie of 2025; it may go down as the defining film of the 2020s.