Box-Office Race Heats Up for the Nominees

Call it box-office gold.

Now that the Oscar race is officially underway, Hollywood studios whose films received Academy Award nominations earlier this week are hoping to cash in on the prestige and the massive free publicity generated by the nominations.

If history is any guide, an Oscar-nominated film can see a significant boost at the box office between the time it is nominated and when the Academy Awards are handed out. That could be especially welcome news for smaller films such as “The Apostle” and “Mrs. Brown,” or the big-studio release “L.A. Confidential,” a critics favorite that has failed to ignite at the box office.

No sooner were the 1997 nominations announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last Tuesday than the best picture nominees began seeing results at the ticket counter.

“Good Will Hunting,” for example, saw its grosses surge 5% on Wednesday compared to Wednesday of the prior week, according to a sampling of theaters conducted by ACNielsen EDI, the overnight box-office tracking service for the movie industry.

Three other best picture nominees did even better percentage-wise in the sampling: “As Good as It Gets” climbed 6%, “The Full Monty” jumped 52% and “L.A. Confidential” leaped 56%, the tracking service said. “Titanic,” already one of the biggest-grossing films of all time, had been soaring at the box office before it was nominated.

“I think the general public views the Academy Awards as a real endorsement of quality--that this is the best and it creates interest, not only among regular filmgoers . . . but it also pulls in the less frequent filmgoer who tends to only want to see the best films of the year,” said Tom Borys, ACNielsen EDI’s chief operating officer.

Borys recalled that Clint Eastwood’s 1992 best picture-winning western “Unforgiven” had been virtually out of release by Christmas, but “they brought it back around the nomination and it went on and made $7.4 million between the nomination and the win, and $18.5 million after the win.”

Last year’s Oscar winner, “The English Patient,” had its biggest single weekend after it was nominated--$4.5 million compared to $2.2 million the previous weekend, Borys added.

“The six weeks between the nomination and the Academy Awards are the best time by far for those movies that get nominated,” said Mark Gill, president of Miramax-Los Angeles. “It focuses people’s attention on what to see.”

Gill recalled that Neil Jordan’s 1992 film “The Crying Game” had grossed only $23 million up to the Oscar nominations, but by Academy Awards night it had taken in $63 million.

This year, Miramax is once again taking advantage of its nominations to draw in audiences that may not have seen the studio’s smaller-budget fare. “The Wings of the Dove,” which received four Oscar nominations including a best actress nod for Helena Bonham Carter, was showing last weekend on only 65 screens, but that number has been increased to 378 this weekend, according to the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Inc.

Exhibitor Relations also said that the Miramax film “Mrs. Brown,” for which Judi Dench received a best actress nomination, will see its screen count increased from zero last weekend to 174 this weekend. The Miramax Oscar-nominated film “Good Will Hunting” is already in wide release and will remain in roughly the same number of theaters.

Warner Bros., however, is aggressively trying to capitalize on the Oscar nominations going to its film noir police thriller “L.A. Confidential.” The studio is boosting the number of screens to 814 this weekend compared to 242 the prior weekend.

And after Robert Duvall was nominated for best actor in “The Apostle,” October Films increased the number of screens from 110 to 404 this weekend.

“The Full Monty,” which was released Aug. 13--the earliest of all the Oscar-nominated movies--will see its screen count go from 263 to 339 this weekend.

“I still feel there is a lot of life in this movie,” said Valerie Van Galder, senior vice president of marketing and publicity at Fox Searchlight. “There is still an audience out there for this picture that hasn’t seen it yet and, hopefully, now that it has been nominated, they will.”

But not every studio is following that course. New Line Cinema’s “Wag the Dog,” which received Oscar nominations for best actor (Dustin Hoffman) and best adapted screenplay, is decreasing its screen count this weekend from 1,586 to 1,102. The film was released Christmas Day.

“It’s still playing north of 1,000 screens,” said a New Line spokesman, “which is respectable for any film that has been out as long as it has.”