‘Anora’ Proves There’s Plenty of Life in the Awards Box Office

Those invested in the commercial viability of adult, complex, ambitious filmmaking tend to experience post-COVID box-office reports like a rollercoaster. Every year, some of the most heavily marketed, spectacularly reviewed awards contenders simply fail to take off with audiences. Cate Blanchett’s Tár brought in a fraction of the ticket sales it likely would’ve managed pre-COVID; ditto Steven Spielberg’s back-to-back best picture nominees West Side Story and The Fabelmans. As this fall season launched, highlighted by a bunch of promising titles, headlines indicated that the theatrical climate was not improving.

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Allow me to play optimist for a moment here, though. The most creatively successful movies to come out of the year’s major film festivals, from Cannes to Telluride to Toronto, are by and large finding an audience. They’re building on the momentum of last year’s gains, which saw small and/or challenging titles ranging from Past Lives to The Zone of Interest to Poor Things gross north of $40 million globally—apiece.

Neon has been steadily rolling out its Palme d’Or winner, Anora, over the past few weeks to striking results. In its second weekend in theaters, the Sean Baker critical darling surged to no. 8 overall at the domestic box-office, despite screening in only 34 theaters; its opening frame elicited the second-best per-theater dollar average gross since COVID, and one that also would have been impressive in any year pre-2020, given its brazen originality and lack of marquee talent. Baker himself has been making movies for decades, and will easily set a box-office record for himself with Anora.

It’s the kind of traditional, gradual platform rollout that many consider to be dying, in an era where indies need to gobble up as much cash as quickly as possible. “There are some old tools that I think are still absolutely the way to bring films into market—launching at top-tier festivals, working your way into fall and setting yourself up for multiple windows,” Neon’s CEO Tom Quinn tells me. “The only thing I would say is, you can’t be a pretender. For those films that merit that kind of release, I think you can be handsomely rewarded.”

Quinn knows a thing or two about this. Neon’s historic streak of backing five Palme d’Or winners in a row includes the phenomenon of Parasite and last year’s international juggernaut, Anatomy of a Fall. “Anatomy of a Fall was a $5 million grossing film, but on home [entertainment] it did the same number—which is off the charts. That’s 10 times what it should do on home-ent,” Quinn says. “When we tested Anatomy of a Fall, the number one reason why people came to see the film was that it won the Palme d’Or.”

In other words, good buzz still matters. Last weekend, Focus Features saw its big contender Conclave exceed expectations, grossing $6.5 million in under 1,800 theaters. Over the week that followed, it upped that total to nearly $10 million, signaling strong word-of-mouth that will take the Edward Berger papal drama far across the fall. It’s finding audiences in the same corridor—in similar volume—that Focus saw just last year for The Holdovers, another significant post-Covid success for a smaller-scale character drama: that film made over $20 million domestically, significantly more than director Alexander Payne’s last independent feature, 2013’s Nebraska.

Conclave was one of the splashiest world premieres out of Telluride. Another, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, platformed successfully in select venues in late September before flatlining in its wide theatrical break—so much so that Conclave, in just seven days of release, has already outgrossed Reitman’s film. But Saturday Night also elicited relatively mixed reviews. All of those aforementioned successes from the last few years—Past Lives, Zone of Interest, Holdovers, Anatomy of a Fall, Poor Things—hit the “universal acclaim” tier on review aggregator Metacritic. That’s not true of Saturday Night, or The Apprentice—another specialty title struggling in US markets—or the self-financed fiascos that are Megalopolis and Horizon, both of which have been critical punching bags.

“When people see a movie and or a certain sentiment takes hold, it travels faster than it ever has—and things underperform at an alarming rate too,” Quinn says. “Without naming names, companies or movies, there’s a certain part of the business that needs a reset—some of it’s IP driven, some of it’s serving a genre in a way that’s either fresh or interesting.”

This fall’s ultimate example of that reset is The Substance, a body-horror extravaganza made by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, and starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. The Cannes premiere of the film I attended was the most electric screening I’ve gone to this year. The Substance opened fairly quietly in North America for distributor Mubi, an outcome that felt severely disappointing. But the movie held on; then it roared. Maintaining some of the best week-to-week holds of any film this year, it’s now managed an approximately $15 million domestic haul, with more than $40 million worldwide. It’s the biggest success ever for the relatively nascent Mubi, and a powerful statement that originality can still sell.

Universal was originally set to make this movie with Fargeat. The studio greenlit her script and production had already started when executives started getting queasy. “You can write, ‘It’s going to be tons of blood,’ but people don’t really think it’s going to be that much—having something on the page, and having something on the screen are two very different things,” Fargeat tells me.

She ended up having to part ways with the studio to make the movie she believed in: “I needed to stick to my choices, but there were for sure some very hard moments because you feel alone, you feel rejected, you feel like you created a monster.” Fargeat took The Substance to Cannes amid that heartache and without a distributor; by the festival’s end, Mubi had acquired it and Fargeat won the screenplay prize. The risk, already, had paid off.

That The Substance actually made money from there? Let that be a powerful lesson as the specialty rollercoaster continues: Some creative bravery in Hollywood, at least, can still be rewarded as it should.

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