Since the last three Best Picture winners were released before fall, it’s not too early to wonder how many films released in the first half of 2024 will be part of the Oscar season six months from now. What’s more, it’s not too early to wonder if the first six months of 2024 will wind up being on, above, or below par with the first six months of years past.
In 2023, “Past Lives” was the only movie released in theaters before July that went on to a Best Picture nomination – since “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” were released only three weeks later. By that context, the first half of 2024 seems to be right on that pace since “Dune: Part Two” is considered the only movie released in theaters before July that should get into Best Picture.
Both would be far below the pace of 2022 when three movies released in the year’s first six months got Best Picture nominations – including eventual winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” and “Elvis.” As for 2020 and 2021, they don’t count due to the pandemic screwing up release dates and award season schedules all around. Yet the last few years are still ahead of 2019 when the Best Picture nominee with the earliest theatrical release was “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” in late July.
Nonetheless, retrospectives about early 2024 will likely involve more hand-wringing about the coming Oscar season and how supposedly thin these last six months have been.
Even though “Past Lives” was the only eventual Best Picture nominee in theaters before July 2023, there were no worries about whether the field would get bigger. Not only was “Barbenheimer” on the way but fellow future nominees “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” and “The Zone of Interest” had already been screened at Cannes. Now in 2024, Palme d’Or winners “Anora” and “Emilia Perez” are the Cannes films with the best if not only chance to be major contenders, although they are far from locks yet. For that matter, there’s no “Barbenheimer” coming to theaters in a few weeks, although A24’s “Sing Sing” starts its potential Oscar run on July 12th.
Still, when it comes to movies that general audiences saw before the Fourth of July, it looks more like “Dune: Part Two” is the only film that will factor significantly in awards season by early 2025. There are critics and online pundits that will likely push for the likes of “Challengers,” “Hit Man,” and maybe “Kinds of Kindness” from the 2023 Oscar season runner-up Yorgos Lanthimos. But at most, the best they can probably hope for is lone screenplay nominations (and a chance at Best Original Score for Luca Guadagnino’s electrifying tennis film) unless several pegged fall festival favorites severely tank.
Right now, that certainly isn’t expected, as the first predictions from the staff here at Next Best Picture are guessing. They indeed have “Dune: Part Two” as a consensus Best Picture nominee, and they have Denis Villeneuve as a projected Best Director nominee. They expect it to have at least eight more technical nominations. However, no other film that premiered for non-festival audiences before July 1st even received a single vote in Best Picture. As for the other top seven above-the-line categories, the only pre-July film to make any projected top ten is “Hit Man” for Best Adapted Screenplay, where it is slated as a distant ninth.
Some will probably make a case that “Inside Out 2” should be a factor since it seemingly saved the summer box office. However, if the far more acclaimed “Inside Out” couldn’t crack the Best Picture field in 2015, the merely liked “Inside Out 2” has no chance, no matter how many box office records it breaks. But it is at least surely locked in as a Best Animated Feature nominee – and is second in the first NBP projections behind “The Wild Robot,” in fact – just like last early summer’s biggest animated hit “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” last June’s Pixar release “Elemental,” and Netflix’s late June release “Nimona.”
And while many are predicting “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” for a few technical nominations, no one has it predicted to match “Fury Road’s” nominations for Best Picture or Best Director. Perhaps Chris Hemsworth could become a Best Supporting Actor contender later in the year depending on how the rest of the field shapes up. It’s certainly his most acclaimed work to date and many may feel it’s time for the God of Thunder to receive this level of recognition from the industry outside of all the other successes he’s obtained through his career in the MCU.
In the old days (really just a few years ago), it was generally accepted that the general public didn’t see Oscar nominees until well after July 4th, while the first six months of the year or more were just for box office plays. There were exceptions like “Black Panther” in 2018, “Get Out” in 2017, “Mad Max: Fury Road” in 2015, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” in 2014, “The Tree of Life” in 2011, and Pixar nominees “Up” and “Toy Story 3” in 2009 and 2010. But with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” having won it all after being released in March 2022, and “CODA” and “Oppenheimer” winning after coming out in the mid-late summer of 2021 and 2023, the so-called Oscars offseason is getting shorter.
Still, 2024 is shaping up to be an exception, although it might be no more of one than 2023 was. In fact, “Dune: Part Two” may have about five times the nominations that the early 2023 nominee “Past Lives” did. And while Celine Song’s film barely kept its Best Picture slot after all the fall contenders and festival films came out, “Dune: Part Two” should be considered a mortal lock no matter how crowded the rest of the season becomes – if it’s that crowded at all.
Will that be enough to make it a potential “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” or at least a more win-competitive threat than a fellow blockbuster sequel “Top Gun: Maverick,” ultimately was? Once the rest of the 2024 field reveals itself, it will be far easier to answer. At the moment, unseen films like “Blitz” and “The Nickel Boys” and the soon-to-be widely seen “Sing Sing” are the biggest early picks to actually take Best Picture.
But for now, “Dune: Part Two” still stands alone as the only “sure thing” contender with a wide release so far – at least until “Sing Sing” comes out, until “Anora” and other Cannes films are released in the fall, and until Venice, Toronto, Telluride and New York’s festivals launch the rest of the field. In that regard, maybe 2024 will be seen as the year where things got “back to normal” regarding awards season.
After the pandemic and after early released Best Picture winners like “CODA,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Oppenheimer,” maybe we are ready for an old-school season where fall releases and fall festival films take up 90 percent of the field and the attention again. But if fall festival season falls apart, if “Dune: Part Two” really is the biggest hit in the field, and if “Sing Sing” grows beyond a mere online-driven hit, perhaps the first six-plus months of 2024 will echo louder at Oscar time than we’re all guessing it will right now.
What do you think were the Oscar contenders from the first-half of 2024? Please let us know in the comments section below or on Next Best Picture’s Twitter account and be sure to check out the Next Best Picture team’s latest Oscar predictions for the year here.
You can follow Robert and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars & Film on Twitter at @Robertdoc1984