The Queen biopic is a giant hit and looks to be among the few year-end awards contenders to really break out.
L-R: Gwilym Lee (Brian May), Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury), and Joe Mazzello (John Deacon) star in Twentieth Century Fox’s BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY Photo Credit: Alex Bailey.
As of this afternoon, Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn’s Widows has earned just $12.3 million in its opening weekend. That is a disappointing sum for 20th Century Fox’s well-reviewed heist drama with a pretty ridiculous cast (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell and Daniel Kaluuya among others) and at least a little bit of Oscar buzz. Sure, it may leg out over the next month, but it’ll need Christmas-worthy legs ( Heat had the Christmas season to leg it from a $8.4m debut to a $67.4m domestic finish in 1995) or overseas might ( Heat made $120m overseas) to justify its $38m production budget. Meanwhile, Fox’s Bohemian Rhapsody ended its fourth global weekend with $127m domestic and $384m worldwide on a $55m budget.
The box office performance of the Bryan Singer-directed biopic (with a little help from Dexter Fletcher) has been nothing short of remarkable. The Freddie Mercury flick, starring Rami Malek as the Queen frontman, is already the second-biggest musical biopic (behind Straight Outta Compton ’s $161 million gross in 2015) and the biggest LGBTQIA movie ever (just ahead of The Birdcage ’s $124m total in 1996) in unadjusted domestic grosses. It’s going to make more worldwide than A Star Is Born, as it’ll pass $400m in the next few days and zoom past the likes of La Land ($441m in 2016/2017) and The Greatest Showman ($434m in 2017/2018). More importantly for the purposes of this discussion, might it find its way into the Best Picture race by sheer virtue of consumer popularity?
Now that’s not to say that folks who otherwise didn’t like the movie ( raises hand) will be swayed to consider it among the best movies of the year because it was a financial success. We got plenty of “Uh… Transformers: Age of Extinction for Best Picture!” jokes back when the Academy floated that Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film category a couple of months ago, but that’s not quite how it was supposed to work. If anything, the category was hobbled by the inconvenient fact that many of the best (or best-loved) popular hits this year happened to be diverse biggies. So, yes, it would have looked awkward if A Star Is Born and First Man battled it out for Best Picture while Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther ended up at the kiddie’s table.
I’m guessing that the Academy may try to bring it back next year, especially if fewer of the critically-acclaimed biggies are demographic touchstones along the lines of Black Panther. But either way, had the category existed as intended, I’d argue that Bohemian Rhapsody would have been in the running alongside Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians, Mission: Impossible Fallout and A Quiet Place or Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. But two things of note have occurred since then. First, the Academy nixed the “best blockbuster” category after folks associated with the two most likely winners ( Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther) essentially said, “We don’t want it.” Second, Bohemian Rhapsody has emerged as a word-of-mouth sensation and one of the few would-be Oscar flicks to actually break out.
It’s been easy to not notice this under the soothing balm of Venom, A Star Is Born, Halloween and Bohemian Rhapsody, but most of the would-be Oscar movies have struggled this season. I honestly thought Widows would be an exception, as it’s a seemingly mainstream piece of star-driven, high concept pulp fiction that happens to be excellent entertainment and excellent art. Of the various platforming seasonal offerings, only Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek’s The Old Man and the Gun has crossed even $10 million, although there is time for the likes of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Beautiful Boy, Boy Erased and Ben is Back. The Hate U Give will top $30m, but that was always an Oscar longshot no matter how great it turned out.
First Man disappointed with just $44 million domestic, and I’d be pleasantly surprised if anything else coming down the pike, be it a studio flick like The Front Runner, Green Book, The Mule, Vice and On the Basis of Sex or a comparative arthouse gem like The Favourite, Mary: Queen of Scots, If Beale Street Could Talk and Vox Lux ended up matching even First Man ’s “disappointing” $44m domestic cume. Now that means that A Star Is Born is even more of a front-runner alongside Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. And unless Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns turns out to be as good as rumblings suggest it might be, the season will wrap up with only a few outright commercial hits.
Bryan Singer is (obviously) not getting a Best Director nomination, but Rami Malek is now in serious contention for Best Actor. It is not entirely implausible that the movie ends up among the Best Picture nominees, especially if rank-and-file Academy members like the movie more than the critics. It’ll depend on what breaks out, both critically and commercially, and how the commercial fortunes of the yet-to-be-released offerings affect their Oscar hopes. To the extent that the Academy voters care about having a few commercial hits in the running, Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman and A Star Is Born may be enough. But if not, then Mary Poppins Returns and/or Bohemian Rhapsody may fit the bill of a would-be Oscar contender that audiences actually saw in theaters.
Even if this is baloney, at the very least the movie represents a rare case of Fox actually making bank by offering the kind of adult-skewing product that everyone claims to want. It will be interesting to see if the blow-out success of Bohemian Rhapsody and the (thus far) slightly disappointing figures for the (admittedly smaller-scale) offerings change the narrative for the popular and IMAX-friendly Queen biopic. Either way, with A Star Is Born, Mary Poppins Returns and Bohemian Rhapsody potentially ending the year as among the few year-end awards contenders that actually broke out, well, as I’ve been saying for years, the live-action musical is still a very healthy genre. Maybe Sony should make Venom 2 into a musical.
I’ve studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years.
