LOS ANGELES — The producers of the Oscars telecast always breathe easier when there are a couple of major blockbusters in the best picture race, knowing audiences are more likely to tune in to the ceremony if they've actually seen the films. This year's lineup offers only partial assurance.

The 10 films nominated for best picture have earned a combined $662 million at the domestic box office and about $1.4 billion worldwide, according to current theatrical grosses — a drop of roughly 18% from last year's global box-office total.

In 2025, the best picture slate brought in about $1.7 billion globally, buoyed by box-office juggernauts "Wicked" and "Dune: Part Two." The year before that, the nominees reached $2.7 billion worldwide, driven largely by the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon.

Go back one year further, and the contrast becomes even starker. The 2023 best picture field set a modern high-water mark of $4.4 billion worldwide, powered by the mega-hits "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Avatar: The Way of Water." This year's slate represents a precipitous 68% drop from that peak.

In raw commercial terms, this marks the most modest showing for a best picture field since the pandemic-disrupted 2022 Oscars, when theatrical attendance had yet to recover and only one nominee cleared the $100 million-mark worldwide.

As in recent seasons, much of the box office is concentrated among a small number of films. Three nominees — Apple's "F1" and Warner Bros.' "Sinners" and "One Battle After Another" — account for roughly $1.21 billion worldwide, or about 87% of the slate's total global box office. "F1" is the largest contributor, with $631.7 million worldwide, giving this year's field its clearest commercial anchor. "Sinners" follows with about $368 million globally, while "One Battle After Another" added roughly $206 million worldwide.

Beyond those three titles, the drop-off is steep. "Marty Supreme," the slate's next-highest earner, brought in just under $95 million worldwide. Several films, including "Bugonia," "Hamnet" and "Sentimental Value," played primarily to art-house audiences. Two nominees — "Frankenstein" and "Train Dreams" — are Netflix releases that received only minimal theatrical exposure.

Two high-profile sequels that could have significantly lifted this year's totals — "Wicked: For Good" and "Avatar: Fire and Ash" — failed to make the cut with Oscar voters.

Even as the box-office profile of the best picture field has become more modest, Oscar ratings have shown signs of stabilizing. Last year's telecast averaged 19.7 million viewers across ABC and Hulu, a slight increase from the previous year, according to Nielsen data. The modest uptick was aided in part by expanded streaming availability (which will increase once the show starts streaming on YouTube in 2029), suggesting that the relationship between Oscar ratings and box-office muscle has become less direct than it once was. Even so, viewership remains far below its peak, when more than 55 million people tuned in to watch "Titanic" win best picture in 1998.

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