Need a quick 2 million? Get nominated for best picture.

When a movie gets nominated for Best Picture, studios and exhibitors launch into action. Theater counts expand. Marketing efforts redouble. Distributors call in favors. Publicists work overtime. Why? Because Oscar nominations make money.

In 2007, a group of academics tried to quantify the value of a nomination. They found that an Oscar nomination for best picture or best actor/actress “generally has a positive impact on a film’s probability of survival, its market share of screens, and the average revenue per screen”¹. Back in 2005, a group of economists suggested nominations could increase a film’s box office by around 5-15%, depending on the category².

But these studies were both 20 years ago. Back then, theater-going habits and Academy processes were both quite different than they are today. For example, the Academy only nominated 5 movies for best picture instead of today’s 10 nominees. Additionally, these previous analyses looked at total revenue over the entire theatrical run, which is a big, messy number influenced by a million things. I’m going to ask a question that is a little more focused. In the immediate aftermath of the nomination announcement, do we see a spike in box office revenue? If so, how big?

The Lineup

I chose the 2024 Oscar cycle because 8 out of 10 nominees had strong theatrical runs on either side of the announcement (as opposed to 5 of the 10 for this year). Here they are, with how many theaters each was playing in before the announcement:

(Maestro was also nominated but wasn’t playing in theaters during the study window. Barbie exited mid-study.)

For comparison, I also tracked 75 other films playing during the same 42-day window. Everything from Wonka and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom to The Boys in the Boat and Ferrari.

The Obvious Answer (That’s Wrong)

The simplest thing you could do is compare nominees’ box office before and after the announcement.

Before: $101,000 per day (averaged across nominees) After: $161,000 per day

A 59% jump. Case closed, right?

Not so fast. The Golden Globes happened two weeks earlier, and Critics’ Choice was the same week. Award season creates its own momentum distinct from the Academy and nomination front-runners were already picking up buzz from the flotsam and jetsam of other awards.

Was this the Oscar bump, or just the awards-season-in-general bump? Maybe Oppenheimer, for example, was already on an upward trajectory because it just won the Golden Globes. Or maybe January is just a good month for prestige dramas. Or maybe theater counts naturally expand in week 10 of release regardless of nominations. The point is that you can’t tell if the increase is because of the Oscar nomination or because of something else entirely.

I need a counterfactual that shows what would have happened to these films without the nomination.

Adding a Comparison Group

So, rather than looking at the simple revenue bump for nominees, I need to look at how the other films in theaters were performing. And, unsurprisingly, they were all slowly losing revenue over time.

Non-nominees averaged $477,000/day before the announcement and $254,000/day after. That’s a 47% collapse. This is normal; most movies lose audience every week. The January box office is a graveyard of holiday holdovers.

The chart below normalizes both groups so their pre-announcement average equals 100. You can see that on announcement day (Day 0) the line trends jump in opposing directions, where Non-nominees keep sliding and nominees reverse direction and take off.

There are two complications worth briefly addressing here. First, Nominees and non-nominees are fundamentally difference beasts. Non-nominees include blockbusters, horror flicks, and family films. These movies have much higher baseline grosses in general and in this observable snapshot ($477K vs. $101K). I’m literally trying to compare art-house prestige films like Past Lives to Aquaman. Second, there is a clear upward award season bump visible even before nominees were announced. Meaning, that the pre-nominees were already trending up even before the nominations were announced, likely due to buzz from other awards.

Juxtaposing Trends

So, I can’t just look at pre- and post-announcement box office trends to understand revenue fluctuations. And, I can’t compare nominees to non-nominees directly since they’re fundamentally different types of films.

But I can compare their changes in trajectory. Nominees went from $101K to $161K per day. That’s +$60K. Non-nominees went from $477K to $254K per day. That’s -$223K. So, the difference between those two changes is the relative profit estimate.

That $282K/day is the Oscar nomination bump, but look at the decomposed bar on the right. Only $60K of that is new revenue. The other $223K comes from nominees simply not declining at the rate everyone else did. Most of the Oscar bump comes from not losing revenue at the baseline rate of other films in late January and early February. Maybe a more honest but less fun way to frame the question wouldn’t have been, “how much did nominees make?” but “how much did nominees’ trajectory improve relative to everything else in the market?”

By comparing changes instead of levels, this automatically controls for general market trends (they affect both groups equally); Pre-existing award momentum (already baked into the “before” numbers); and, natural decay of any theatrical release over time

So How Much Is It Actually Worth?

You might be tempted to multiply $282K × 8 nominees × 21 days and call it $47 million. But that math has the same problem as the naive before-and-after comparison from earlier. Specifically, it assumes every nominee would have lost the same $223K/day without a nomination. Past Lives was earning $1K/day. It can’t lose $223K/day.

The $282K/day is a valid measure of how much the group-level trajectories diverge. But nominees range from $1K/day to $465K/day, and you can’t apply a single dollar-amount shift across that range. What you can do is apply the same rate of decline. Non-nominees fell 47% from pre- to post-period. So for each nominee, I ask what would this film have earned if it had declined by that same 47% from its own baseline? The gap between that counterfactual and what the film actually earned is the attributable effect.

While I have the full per-film breakdown in the Revenue Attribution appendix, here are one or two quick examples. For Past Lives, the counterfactual is $1K × 0.53 = $584/day. It actually earned $12K/day. So, the treatment effect about $11K/day. For American Fiction, the counterfactual is $302K × 0.53 = $161K/day, and it actually earned $432K/day. So its treatment effect is approximately $271K/day. Sum those film-specific effects across all eight nominees and 22 post-announcement days, and the total is roughly $18 million, about $2.2 million per nominee.

The Machine Behind the Bump

The announcement itself is certainly not the sole factor in how money floods towards nominees. As I mentioned above, studios understand that a nomination puts additional possible revenue on the table, and they subsequently spring into action. Thus, the most dramatic response isn’t necessarily audience behavior. It’s what distributors do. Within days of the announcement, theater counts non-organically explode because studios and exhibitors recognize that the information signal from the academy will precipitate a short-term spike in audience demand.

Past Lives went from 5 theaters to 188. Five. To one hundred and eighty-eight. That is a huge expansion that the film otherwise likely would have never seen.

Most expansions were more modest, with the average nominee going from 178 screens to 756 (still a 325% expansion). Distributors are betting that the Oscar stamp will fill those seats. It’s a coordinated, capital-intensive response to a single informational signal.

And here’s the part that I’m not sure how to interpret, after more than tripling screen counts, nominees’ per-screen averages fell as films spread into wider markets. I’m sure that the studios with better data have much more sophisticated ways to think about this. But calculating how many screens to expand to and in which locations to gain maximum profit must be its own annual scramble, and there is no doubt some messiness to this signal due to exhibitor autonomy. If you know anything about how this happens, I’d love to know more.

But that’s a separate wondering. For this limited scope analysis, the fact that total gross rose at all, against a backdrop where everything else was declining, demonstrates the demand shift was real. Many people who were never going to see these movies in theaters the day before the announcement decided to go see them shortly after the announcement.

Small Films, Giant Leaps

But not every nominee gets the same number of people deciding to go see their film, and the disparity between nominees is worth examining in both raw and relative terms.

Poor Things — already in 824 theaters, already a commercial hit — saw essentially no bump at all. It didn’t need one. Everyone already knew about it, and it was at the declining end of an already successful critical and theatrical run.

But Past Lives? A quiet A24 drama about two childhood friends reconnecting in New York, playing on five screens in the entire country? An Oscar nomination told millions of people, “this film exists, and it is one of the ten best of the year.” A nod like that put the otherwise obscure film into the cultural zeitgeist in a way it otherwise wouldn’t have.

In my opinion, that is one of the key takeaways from this analysis. An Oscar nomination is an information signal, and information is most valuable where uncertainty is highest. For a tiny art-house film, the nomination resolves the fundamental question, “is this worth seeing?” in a way that drives audiences to watch. For a blockbuster, that question was already answered months ago.

What This Means

The Academy doesn’t buy tickets. It doesn’t book theaters. It doesn’t run ads. It just reads ten names, and here’s what I learned about the consequences.

1. Oscar nominations deliver an immediate, measurable boost. Nominees gained $60K/day while others lost $223K/day, a $282K/day divergence. Film-level estimates put the total at roughly $18 million across eight nominees over three weeks.

2. Distributors respond aggressively. Screen counts expanded by 325% (adding 578 theaters per nominee), suggesting coordinated supply-side amplification.

3. Demand matters too. Per-theater revenue also rose, confirming genuine audience interest, not just screen proliferation.

4. Small films benefit most. The effect is largest for limited-release films (<200 theaters) where Oscar credibility acts as a quality indicator and a means of gaining additional exposure.

5. It’s worth a LOT. Roughly $2.2 million per nominee over three weeks, totaling $18 million across the eight nominees in theaters. This captures only the immediate window — the full Oscar effect, including extended runs and international releases, is substantially larger.

6. The slopes tell the story. Using 7-day rolling averages (to smooth weekend spikes), nominees’ trajectory turns upward while others continue falling. The lines split near the announcement.

The next time someone tells you awards don’t matter, tell them they matter about $2 million in three weeks.

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Appendices

Limitations

The control group is imperfect, but not as bad as it sounds. I compared nominees to everything else in theaters. Ideally I’d compare them only to similar prestige films. But nearly every film in theaters during late January knows it’s competing in awards season. The control group isn’t a group of blockbusters dropped in at random, it’s mostly successful holdovers from holiday season and films that positioned themselves for this exact window. Many of them were contenders or hopefuls in at least one Oscar category. That said, it’s still a rough comparison. The $282K/day additive divergence overstates the per-film dollar impact when naively multiplied out — the film-level estimates in Appendix B are the more defensible total.

Awards season is noisy. Golden Globes, SAG, Critics’ Choice, and BAFTA all cluster around the same period. I can’t perfectly isolate the Oscar signal from the broader awards-season buzz.

I only captured three weeks. The full Oscar effect includes extended theatrical runs, international releases, streaming deals, the ceremony itself, and more. The overall impact is almost certainly larger than estimated here. The $2.2 million per nominee captures only the immediate post-announcement window. It is likely a floor for the total Oscar effect on any given nominee’s theatrical revenue.

Methodology

For the curious:

• Data: 84 films, ~1,944 film-day observations, January 2 – February 13, 2024

• Treated group: 9 of 10 Best Picture nominees (Maestro excluded, not in theaters)

• Control group: 75 other films active in the same 42-day window

• Method: Difference-in-differences. Comparing the change in nominees’ daily gross to the change in non-nominees’ daily gross

• Key assumption: Parallel trends. Absent the nomination, both groups would have followed similar trajectories

• Outcome variable: Daily gross revenue (also analyzed in log form to handle skewness)

• Result: +$282K/day average additive divergence; $18M total across 8 nominees via film-level multiplicative counterfactuals (see Appendix B)

• Visual smoothing: 7-day centered rolling averages to smooth weekend/weekday cycles

The Control Group

These 75 films were in theaters during the study window and serve as the comparison group:

Wonka, Migration, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Anyone But You, The Boys in the Boat, The Color Purple, The Iron Claw, Ferrari, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, The Boy and the Heron, Night Swim, Mean Girls, Argylle, I.S.S., Lisa Frankenstein, Madame Web, Bob Marley: One Love, Ordinary Angels, Drive-Away Dolls, Dune: Part Two, Cabrini, Imaginary, Love Lies Bleeding, Kung Fu Panda 4, Immaculate, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, The First Omen, Civil War, Abigail, Monkey Man, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Challengers, Unsung Hero, The Fall Guy, IF, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Watchers, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2, The Bikeriders, A Quiet Place: Day One, Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot, Longlegs, Deadpool & Wolverine, Trap, Twisters, Cuckoo, Borderlands, Alien: Romulus, Blink Twice, Reagan, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Never Let Go, Transformers One, The Wild Robot, Megalopolis, Joker: Folie a Deux, Terrifier 3, Smile 2, Venom: The Last Dance, Here, Red One, Wicked, Gladiator II, Moana 2, Kraven the Hunter, Mufasa: The Lion King, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, September 5, Better Man, The Fire Inside

Revenue Attribution, From Average DiD to Film-Level Estimates

The headline $282K/day is a valid average additive treatment effect from the difference-in-differences specification. However, multiplying this average by the number of nominees and post-period days ($282K × 8 × 21 ≈ $47M) implicitly assumes the treatment effect is uniform across all nominees. In other words, it assumes that a film earning $1K/day (Past Lives) and a film earning $465K/day (Poor Things) both experience the same dollar-magnitude boost. This is economically implausible and is an artifact of the additive model.

The core issue is that the additive DiD’s counterfactual assumes that absent treatment, every nominee would have lost the same $223K/day that non-nominees lost on average. For a film earning $1K/day, that counterfactual is negative revenue, a logical impossibility.

A more defensible approach constructs counterfactuals at the film level. The control group declined by 46.7% from pre- to post-period ($476,680/day → $254,060/day). Under the parallel trends assumption in proportional terms, each nominee would have declined by this same rate absent treatment, thus:

Counterfactual_i = Pre-avg_i × (Control post-avg / Control pre-avg)

The treatment effect for film i is then the gap between what it actually earned and what it would have earned under this counterfactual, summed over the 22-day post-period. So, the totals would look like this.

Note: Barbie exited theaters before the announcement (0 post-period observations) and is excluded. Maestro was never in theaters during the window.

Observable sanity check

As cross-validation, I computed the literal area between the lines in Chart 2 for each of the 22 post-period days, I took each nominee’s actual daily gross, subtracted what it would have earned if it had followed the control group’s daily trajectory from its own pre-period baseline, and summed across all 8 films and all 22 days. This purely observable measure yields $17.66 million.

A third approach would be log-level DiD, which estimates the counterfactual using mean log-changes rather than the ratio of means. This approach yields an estimate of $16.65 million.

So, across these three approaches we get a nice sanity check on our methods, and a get the total attributable revenue in the range of $17–18 million, or roughly $2.2 million per nominee.

Why the additive DiD overstates the total

The additive specification’s $282K/day estimate is dominated by the two largest films. American Fiction ($302K/day baseline) and Poor Things ($465K/day baseline) together account for the bulk of the additive average. When this average is applied uniformly to films like Past Lives ($1K/day), the implied counterfactual requires the film to earn deeply negative revenue absent treatment.

The $282K/day remains a valid summary of the average divergence between group trajectories, and the decomposition into $60K new revenue + $223K avoided decline is descriptively accurate at the group level. But for dollar-denominated totals, the film-level multiplicative approach is the appropriate method.

Next Questions

1. Does increased revenue for nominees come from new theater goers or crowd out from people who likely would have seen a movie anyway?

2. Do other nomination categories receive a similar bump?

3. Do films with multiple nominations receive larger revenue increases? If so, is there a generalizable trend to the revenue bump per additional nomination?

4. What is a win worth?

5. Do other award nominations have similar revenue increase patterns?

6. How has this effect changed over time?

7. Do “re-expansions” (films that had shed theaters and then add them back after the nom) see a different daily pattern than films that were steadily expanding?

8. Does the effect differ by distributor (e.g., major studio vs. indie)?

9. Does the estimate change if we drop the announcement day (day 0) from the post-period (donut design)?

10. If we extend the post-window to 60 days, does the daily effect decay to zero, or do nominees sustain a small premium?

References

1. Nelson, R. A., Donihue, M. R., Waldman, D. M., & Knapp, C. (2001). What’s an Oscar Worth? Economic Inquiry, 39(1), 1–16.

2. Deuchert, E., Adjamah, K., & Pauly, F. (2005). For Oscar Glory or Oscar Money? Journal of Cultural Economics, 29(3), 159–176.