How are foreign-language awards contenders faring at the US box office?

All five nominees in the international feature film category of the Oscars Will be playing theatrically heading into the Academy’s crucial March 17-22 final voting period, and three are already available for home viewing.

Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Danish entry Flee has been on digital platforms since January 25; Pawo Choyning Dorji’s Lunana: A Yak In The Classroom from Bhutan was set to migrate to PVoD on the weekend of February 11-13 immediately after the nominations were announced; and Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand Of God has been streaming on Netflix since its December 15, 2021 launch.

Only Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car and Joachim Trier’s Norwegian hopeful The Worst Person In The World continue to be exclusive theatrical plays. “Our release strategies for awards contenders during the pandemic have run the full gamut of 17-to-90-day-plus theatrical windows, combined with accelerated PVoD/VoD as well as streaming windows,” says a spokesperson for Neon, distributor of The Worst Person In The World. “It all really depends on how best to amplify each film’s chances with both consumers and voters. The marketing, though, does not change.”

At the US box office: Oscar-nominated international films

For Peter Becker, president of The Criterion Collection and a partner in Janus Films, which distributes Drive My Car in the US, the plan behind the November 24, 2021 release was — as might be expected — a traditional one for a sombre three-hour meditation on grief.

“We knew the film needed time to develop word of mouth and wanted to take things slowly,” says Becker. “We opted for a true old-school platform release and opened on two screens in New York and are actually still on-screen in both of those venues, 12 weeks later.

“We added LA the following week and when the film broke the post-pandemic record at the Nuart [Theatre], we knew we were on to something,” he continues. “It’s been a slow and steady expansion ever since, adding a few markets a week. To date, we’ve played 300 theatres in over 260 cities, and are continuing to roll out.”

Aware that older audiences have been slower to return to cinemas during the public health crisis, Janus held back some of its older-skewing markets including Phoenix and Palm Springs until there were signs Omicron infection levels were receding, and targeted younger viewers in other markets instead.

Drive My Car had reached $1.5m by February 22 after expanding to 213 theatres.

“We are keeping an eye on ticket sales and demand to help gauge how wide we can go and to ensure audiences have a chance to see it on the big screen,” he notes, adding: “We would love nothing more than for Drive My Car to be one of the films that brings people back to the cinema and helps the industry’s recovery — which is very important to us.”

Attention seekers

Samuel Goldwyn Films released last year’s Danish Oscar winner Another Round, and acquired this season’s Bhutanese entry Lunana: A Yak In The Classroom around the time it made the 15-strong shortlist last December. It opened on January 21 on eight screens and the campaign was driven by the need to reach voters in a very short space of time.

“It’s difficult to get attention for movies from a place that, frankly, rarely makes movies,” says Peter Goldwyn, president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, who first watched Lunana on the Academy Screening Room online portal after the film’s publicists alerted him to it. He regards the film as a broadly commercial play that appeals to older and younger audiences. “We opened in major markets, got glowing reviews, and surprisingly good box office.”

Word of mouth screenings and Q&As available to Academy members have helped promote the film. One vital factor Goldwyn cites is the Academy Screening Room. “It’s levelled the playing field. It used to be very hard to get foreign-language films in front of people unless you were with a distributor who could afford a campaign. Now everybody can watch the movie and it lets the quality of the movie, rather than the campaign, lead the way.”

The PVoD launch on February 11 had been planned in the eventuality Lunana would get a nomination. Goldwyn says it will amplify attention for a film that cannot go out in thousands of cinemas. “We have discovered great performance on VoD with foreign-language films,” he says. “Last year we had a French movie called Delicious, which was in the top 20 VoD titles.”

Neon’s The Worst Person In The World only opened on February 4 in four cinemas before expanding to 265 theatres, passing $1m on February 20. Stablemate Memoria from Colombia, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and starring Tilda Swinton, did not make the shortlist but enjoyed a fairly eccentric release model. Neon gave it a public audience qualifying run at the IFC Center in New York where it grossed what executives call a “robust” $35,000. In spring it will play “cinemas-only forever”, one venue at a time each week.

Netflix has given theatrical outings to its contenders and Sorrentino’s The Hand Of God was set to play in approximately 10 cinemas the weekend after the nominations came out. In the same way, there was a small uplift starting last November for Tatiana Huezo’s Mexican shortlisted film Prayers For The Stolen, which debuted on the platform on November 17.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the theatrical devotees at Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) have kept Pedro Almodovar’s Spanish drama Parallel Mothers, starring best lead actress nominee Penelope Cruz, exclusively in cinemas. (The Good Boss starring Cruz’s husband Javier Bardem was Spain’s official Oscar submission and will open theatrically in the US in spring via Cohen Media Group.) Finland’s Oscar-shortlisted submission Compartment No. 6 by Juho Kuosmanen — also with SPC — remains exclusively in cinemas.

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