The 2019 Best Picture nominees have one of the biggest combined box office tallies ever

After years of questions about the Academy Awards’ tastes skewing toward artier fare than audiences enjoy (and the Academy taking thwarted stabs to address that fact), the nominations for the 2019 Oscars seem downright populist compared to the past few years of Best Picture nominees. And the box office receipts tell the tale.

For the first time since 2013, the total domestic box office of the eight films nominated for Best Picture topped $1 billion — and that’s without box office receipts for the 10-times-nominated Roma, which streams on Netflix and thus doesn’t really have box office receipts. (It even opted out of collecting box office data for the film’s run in actual movie theaters, though some sources have made unofficial estimates. Regardless, most of the viewing of Roma is happening in homes.)

Indeed, the $1,260,625,731 pulled in by the seven films we have data for is the biggest total for a Best Picture lineup since 2011, when the 10 films nominated (led by Toy Story 3) made $1,357,489,702.

And 2019’s total just might gain on the 2011 total, since many of the movies nominated are still in theaters. While the highest-grossing Best Picture nominee, Black Panther, is long out of theaters, both the second-place (A Star Is Born) and the third-place nominee (Bohemian Rhapsody) are still playing. And that’s to say nothing of most of the other films nominated, which are still comparatively early in their runs and counting on an Oscar nomination box office bump.

When you divide the total by seven to determine the average box office haul of the nominated films we have data for, the number becomes even more impressive: $180,089,390. Though their combined take falls slightly behind those of 2011 and 2010, the average is well ahead of those years ($135,748,970 for 2011; $170,512,813 for 2010), since 10 films were nominated in both those years.

Prior to 2010, it makes less sense to compare the Best Picture category to the present, because only five films per year were nominated for Best Picture from 1945 until 2009. The Academy shifted to a lengthier lineup in the wake of The Dark Knight and Wall-E getting shut out of the Best Picture race in 2009, in hopes that nominating more films in the category would prompt more populist films making the list.

That worked for a while, with movies like Avatar, Up, and Toy Story 3 cracking the list in 2010 and 2011. But in recent years, the year’s biggest hits haven’t always had the most overlap with the Best Picture category. 2019 looks to break that trend. Black Panther received seven total nominations, and it alone made $700,059,566, which is very nearly more than the total box office of all Best Picture nominees in both 2018 and 2017 (in both years, the total box office of all nominees was under $710 million) and is more than the total box office of all Best Picture nominees in 2015 (when it was just $669 million).

Once you add A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody to that mix — both of which have made more than $200 million — the lineup becomes even more skewed toward populism. Sure, there were other big hits that could have been nominated for Best Picture this year (particularly Mary Poppins Returns, A Quiet Place, and Crazy Rich Asians), but at the very least, the 2019 Oscars aren’t going to be awards where anyone can credibly say, “Nobody’s seen any of those movies!”