In the days after Anora won Best Picture at the Oscars, a Variety report looked into the successful Oscar campaign pulled off by NEON, its distributor. One figure was particularly eye-popping: NEON spent $18 million on the “marketing, distribution and awards campaign” for Anora, which was three times the cost of the movie itself.
At the box office, Anora has made $16.1 million domestically and $41.4 million globally since its release last fall. It’s worth noting, as well, that “marketing, distribution, and awards” also refers to the marketing of the film back when it was released; not all of that was spent during awards season specifically.
The piece added that one Oscar candidate this year — I’m going to guess Wicked, but I have no inside information— was the recipient of a $60 million campaign. Studios, after all, can and do spend more on Oscar campaigns than indie distributors like A24 and NEON do.
Was the Oscar Bought?
According to Buzzfeed, a lot of people seem to be misinterpreting what this means. No, it does not mean that the Oscar was “bought”; that $18 million did not go to direct bribes. It was advertising, For Your Consideration ads, flying the cast and filmmakers around the country, maybe a party or two – and, in Anora’s unique case, they sold merch and thongs at a pop-up store.
Indeed, the $18 million figure isn’t especially atypical for an Oscar spending campaign and appears to have been less than what was spent by the film’s rivals. The Brutalist, famously, only cost $10 million; I’m going to guess A24 spent more than that on marketing and the awards campaign.
The Real Problem
I don’t know that studios spending that much is any reason for outrage. It’s not your money, and you don’t work for NEON. If you’re going to argue that expensive Oscar campaigns are the reason movie tickets cost so much, well… they’re not.
I will say this, though: Brady Corbet, who directed The Brutalist, made news weeks ago when he revealed in an interview that he made essentially no money from the film and that he’d spent the last several months so busy with awards interviews that he was unable to work on anything else.
With those massive budgets for FYC campaigns, could the studios consider giving the talent a stipend during their awards campaign? That might be something worthwhile for the guilds to push for.
