Variety’s Rebecca Rubin notes the $35 million earned in six weeks by Daniel Kwan’s and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once. The film stars Michelle Yeoh and so far is only living in actual theaters. It has created enough word of mouth, however, to bring in audiences in a surprising way.
The film’s budget was only $25 mil, so it has already made a profit. For comparison, let’s look at (domestic) box office for the ten Best Picture contenders last year, even after the Oscars:
Dune — $108 million
Belfast — $39 million
West Side Story — $38 million
Everything Everywhere — $35 million
Licorice Pizza — $17 million
King Richard — $15 million
Nightmare Alley — $11 million
Drive My Car — $2 million
Coda (Winner) — $1.6 million (N/A Apple)
The Power of the Dog — N/A (Netflix)
Don’t Look Up — N/A (Netflix)
The article says:
David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research, says the box office milestone points to one truth: “There’s still plenty of room for well-produced, original, creatively-told stories on the big screen.”
He adds, “Platforms have never been easy and I don’t think that will change — they will remain rare. But when a movie is compelling enough, audiences will find that movie and platforming works.”
It’s hard to know what will bring people to the movies. Friend of the site Michael Grei’s 90-year-old mother just went to the movies for the first time in 50 years or so to see Remember Me: The Mahalia Jackson Story. People will come, Ray. They just have to have a good enough reason.
When it comes to the Oscars, however, we have to wonder what kind of year this is going to be and how the financials will shake out.
When the shift to streaming first began. Netflix was way ahead of the curve. However, they recently seem to have been caught off guard somewhat when COVID coincided with the splashy debuts of streaming platforms that could showcase studio blockbusters. Streaming seemed a good fit for Oscar movies, or art films, or adult films that are no longer playing in theaters (and still don’t appear to be making money, at least for now). But with the big blockbusters landing on streaming sites now like HBOMax or Disney+, it seems that the market has changed once again. That tells me (and I don’t know anything about anything) that Netflix should go bigger, not smaller. They should go with big budget effects films that might not be aimed at the Oscar race but are aimed at attracting a wider audience.
That would be my best guess about how that landscape has been altered. Big budget movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home have no problem attracting audiences to theaters. Everyone went to see that movie — it has made a whopping $800 million domestically. That is insane.
They did that without even being released in China. It should be noted that China’s box office is doing much better than ours here in the US and that’s mainly due to their own homegrown films, not American films. If you put that together with TikTok’s popularity, you see China is kind of kicking our ass in many different ways.
At any rate, that Everything Everywhere All at Once is considered a box office success for an “art film.” It shows there is at least some interest in turning out to see a movie if it isn’t also offered on streaming if it is interesting enough.
Therefore, onto the Contender Tracker it goes. Our first Oscar contender for the year. I have to thank Scott Kernen for nudging me to note the film as a Best Picture contender, though I was dragging my feet on that until I actually saw it, which I will do soon.
