Warner Bros. is having the kind of Oscar season most studios could only dream of, and one that their publicity team might secretly fear.
The studio is backing two of this year’s top Best Picture nominees, Paul Thomas Anderson’s action blockbuster “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama “Sinners.” It’s an embarrassment of riches, but it can also create sticky situations. How can you push two movies so strongly without making it seem like you’ve already decided which one voters will choose?
In Oscar season, recognition is as important as momentum. Voters are allergic to being “told” what to do, and nothing raises more eyebrows than the idea that a studio has determined the favorite candidate in a race. That means Warner Bros. will have to take pains to ensure that the campaigns for both films are on par.
That means equal funding, equal endorsements, and equal attention paid to the two candidates. Did I mention the word “equality”? Every screening invitation, every trade advertisement, and every statement from an executive is vetted by a personal publicist representing the talent behind the film (and in some cases, the filmmaker himself). These guys are also constantly reading between the lines, looking for clues to know deep down whether Warner Bros. really has a favorite.
It’s a balancing act. But for most of the season, the racing wasn’t very racing-like.
“One Battle After Another” jumped out early and never slowed down, winning critics’ awards at a pace that suggested inevitability. The film won 35 major critics and guild awards, including the National Board of Reviews, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Association, and National Society of Film Critics. This is a rare feat achieved only by Schindler’s List (1993), LA Confidential (1997), and The Social Network (2010).
Then came the morning of the Oscar nominations.
“Sinners”
©Warner Bros./Courtesy of Everett Collection
Coogler’s Sinners changed the entire season overnight, and the film set a record with 16 Oscar nominations, the most in Academy Awards history. What once seemed like an inevitable coronation for the PTA has become an honest-to-goodness coin toss with a potential historic win for the division’s first-ever black coach. Suddenly, this behemoth of a movie has a true rival, its cinematic cousin. This left WBs, strategists, and publicists managing expectations, and egos.
“You can’t pick horses,” one awards strategist familiar with the campaign told Variety. “The entire studio has to walk an incredibly fine line.”
Once the envelope begins to open, the pressure does not ease. Rather, it is strengthened. Awards spokespeople and strategists describe the job as “being in Switzerland in real time,” maintaining the same neutral body language, level of applause and tone, regardless of category or nominee status. The filmmakers and their team pay attention to everything from who claps first, who cheers the loudest, and who seems the most animated. In a race this close, even a fleeting reaction can be perceived as goodwill, and that perception can linger long after the telecast ends.
To be clear, neither Anderson’s nor Coogler’s camps believe that one film is favored over the other. If anything, both teams, including studio personnel, have described a genuine mutual admiration between the two directors, who are clearly friendly whenever they pass each other on the circuit.
The situation Warner Bros. is in is unusual. The most recent example of the same studio leading two undisputed front-runners came in the 2017 season, when Searchlight Pictures (then Fox Searchlight) campaigned both Martin McDonagh’s crime drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and eventual Best Picture winner Guillermo del Toro’s romantic fantasy The Shape of Water. Coincidentally, the same season marked another major turning point in the industry. The Walt Disney Company announced the acquisition of 21st Century Fox on December 14, 2017.
Before that, we have to go back to 1974, when Paramount Pictures directed Francis Ford Coppola’s epic sequel The Godfather Part II and Roman Polanski’s neo-noir Chinatown, and the former ultimately prevailed.
Other examples can also be found throughout history. United Artists won in 1961 for the musical “West Side Story” and the legal drama “The Judgment at Nuremberg.” And WB went through something similar on another occasion, leading two front-runners from the good old days of 1948’s “Johnny Belinda” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” only to see Universal’s “Hamlet” walk away with Best Picture.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Benicio Del Toro on the set of “One Battle After Another.”
Warner Bros./Courtesy of Everett Collection
What’s different this year from previous years is that money is involved. Modern Oscar campaigns are a far cry from Hollywood’s Golden Age. They operate like a political race with multi-million dollar budgets. And a cottage industry of analysts and bloggers evaluates their every move. Studios in the 1970s had the luxury of letting go. But today, everything is evaluated, sometimes literally, down to the size and placement of For Your Recommend ads.
Sources with direct knowledge say the budgets for this year’s awards campaigns for “One Battle After Another” and “Thinners” are roughly equal, ranging from $14 million to $16 million each.
And that’s exactly what Warner Bros. needed to do. It’s about adjusting your budget, balancing your screening calendar, and evenly distributing your promotional efforts. Even the order in which films appear in press materials can be a hot topic.
“No matter how ‘cool’ a filmmaker is, you realize what works for one person and what doesn’t work for another,” said a spokesperson for another rival studio. “This business is about relationships. Even if your ‘candidate’ isn’t really a candidate, you keep pushing until the competition says otherwise.”
WB’s big year has given the team a much-needed morale boost during a time of real uncertainty. The campaign became a rallying point within the company, tying the studio’s record for most Oscar nominations in a year. While Anderson and Coogler’s films are assigned separate in-house teams, sources say department heads and their staffs have welcomed the competition and are not only enthusiastically rooting for their own titles, but are also visibly rooting for the wins, momentum and milestones of Warner as a whole.
There is also a layer of irony in this moment. The awards season dominance comes as Warner Bros. faces an uncertain future with its pending sale to streaming giant Netflix. The idea of a Best Picture showdown between Warner’s two films feels both celebratory and, in some ways, like a farewell tour.
“It’s like throwing yourself the world’s best going away party,” said one studio executive.
