The Academy Award for Best Picture is supposed to be more than just the film industry’s highest honour. It’s also considered a golden goose for the movie that brings it home. Conventional wisdom holds that a Best Picture Oscar can add ten or twenty million bucks to a film’s gross – or at least, that’s what the conventional wisdom used to say, in the days before DVD and shortened theatrical windows.
The box-office landscape is different now, as the distributors of The Hurt Locker discovered last weekend. In the wake of all the Oscar love for Kathryn Bigelow’s intense study of tensions among an American bomb-disposal unit in occupied Iraq, Summit Entertainment and Maple Pictures rushed to put the movie back onto North American screens. It was expected that the movie – which earned a meagre $13 million in its theatrical run last year – would pull in some substantial coin this time around.
It was not to be. The Hurt Locker grossed some $828,000 in the U.S. and Canada over the weekend, not even making a dent on the box-office charts. (For a sense of scale, Alice In Wonderland pulled in $62.7 million to hold the top spot for a second week, leaving newcomer Green Zone trailing in second place with just $14.3 million.)
And though media types may take this as an indication that the Oscar has lost some of its lustre, I’d like to offer a more practical take on the situation. The Hurt Locker was released to video back in January, and I’d be willing to bet that in this case, it was the buzz of its nine Oscar nominations that got people to bring it home. By the time it took the Best Picture prize, it had already found its audience – and that audience would rather spin up the disc they already have than troop out to the megaplex and spend more money on a ticket.
The myth of the Oscar bump just points out how little regard industry watchers have for home video. It’s changed the game considerably. Instead of holding a title back until March or April to better capitalize on expected awards, studios now rush to release major contenders in November or December, the better to turn the marketing for the DVD into a stealth Oscar campaign.
The Hurt Locker had a fairly standard home-video release, arriving on disc some six months after its theatrical bow. The street date was scheduled well before the flood of accolades from critics’ organizations – including the Toronto Film Critics Association, which gave Bigelow its Best Director prize and ranked her film as a runner-up for Best Picture.
The critical prizes started trickling out in December by the time the movie hit video in January, on a crest of year-end awards, Academy voters were spinning up the screener DVDs they’d all been sent.
That was The Hurt Locker’s real Oscar bump – a moment of cultural synchronicity that gave a decent movie the chance to surge forward and define itself on its merits. It wasn’t about smacking James Cameron down, or acknowledging Bigelow’s gender it was just about finding a hidden treasure.
If you brought The Hurt Locker home on disc, you know the feeling – and that’s why you didn’t need to catch up to it on the big screen last week.[rssbreak]
