Several weeks ago, we compared the box office performance of the movie Deadpool against its eight 2015 Best Picture Academy Award-nominated peers. Back then, we found that the scrappy Deadpool beat all eight films through its first week of release.
Today, we’re producing the sequel to that original story, where this time, we find that the eight Best Picture nominees of 2015 have struck back, taking the cumulative box office crown away from 2016’s Deadpool.
It really shouldn’t be a surprise, but you should always expect that eight movies, even 2015’s Best Picture nominees, will combine to make more money at the box office than just one movie.
The real story here is how the eight 2015 Best Picture nominees did it. Basically, they added another 8,400 theaters in their third week of release to their previous week’s total of 10,487, dwarfing the peak of 3,836 for Deadpool by nearly a factor of 5.
And then, in their fourth week of release, they added another 566.
It was like one of those cliché fight scenes in a superhero movie where the evil league of supervillains start fighting really dirty by ordering their henchmen to “sic ’em” in the hopes of overwhelming their greatly outnumbered foe.
But what if the odds were equalized? What if we calculated the average gross per theater for each day of release for all these movies, and then compared their box office prowess, mano a mano?
Here’s the chart showing the results of that daily calculation for the first four weeks of release for Deadpool and the eight 2015 Best Picture nominees.
And here’s how it looks when we add up the cumulative average box office per theater take.
In this last chart, we confirm that Deadpool is nearly twice the movie that the eight Best Picture nominees of 2015 are where performance in Hollywood matters most. At the box office.
But here’s the best part – the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture and Pretentiousness in 2015, Spotlight, is going to have a sequel. So at some point in the future, we’re going to get a rematch. Alas, without The Revenant 2.
Just like in the movies!
