This year’s best money makers are famously not Academy Award films, sticking to a tradition that only serves to highlight the apparent fact that audiences go the movies to be entertained, not to think.
Last year the highest grossers were:
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2- bringing in over $381 million at the box office.
2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon($352 million)
3. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 ($281 million)
4. The Hangover Part II ($254 million)
One must continue down this list until position 13, when one finally gets to a Best Picture nominee, The Help, which made $170 million last year.
In fact there has been scarcely any film which merited Best Picture recognition while also cashing in. According to the statistician William Briggs, since 1940 15 Best Picture winners made 25% or less of that year’s highest grossing films. In the past ten years this has happened four times:
1. In 2004 Shrek 2 made $441 million compared to Million Dollar Baby’s $100 million.
2. In 2005 Star Wars made $380 million while Crash made $54 million
3. In 2007 Spider Man 3 with $336 million trounced No Country for Old Men at $74 million
4. In 2009 the hi-tech spectacle Avatar raked in a gargantuan $750 million compared to the relatively minuscule take of The Hurt Locker at $17 million
“If this trend continues, in 20 years nobody but Academy members will even have heard of the Best Picture,” Briggs said in a pre-Oscars blog post last year. “On the other hand, if the previous 5 Most Popular pictures are any guide — Shrek 2, Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Spider-Man 3, The Dark Knight, Avatar — the Most Popular movie two decades from now will be targeted at audiences who are still attempting to master pasting and scissoring skills.”
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