Can ‘Wicked’ Follow In These Blockbusters’ Best-Picture Footsteps?

The 2024 Oscar best picture winner Oppenheimer was a unicorn.

“It’s rare that a movie has both box office success and the kind of critical acclaim that would position it to win the Oscar,” says Michael Schulman, author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, of a film that has raked in nearly $1 billion globally. Christopher Nolan’s biographical drama “was a gigantic blockbuster and a phenomenon at the box office, but it was also an auteur film, a lofty historical subject.”

By that standard, Wicked may have a slightly tougher time if it hopes to repeat the feat this year, as it’s approaching $400 million globally but doesn’t come with quite the auteur signature or serious subject matter that Oppenheimer did.

“It’s a gigantic blockbuster, but it’s a musical, which doesn’t often win Oscars,” says Schulman of Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway sensation that stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande (the filmmakers of La La Land would agree). “It’s sort of targeted toward younger girls, which shouldn’t be a hurdle but has been. Just look at Barbie,” he adds, pointing to Greta Gerwig’s fantasy dramedy, which lost to Oppenheimer.

That said, Wicked does have a path forward on action-adventure grounds. In the past 30 years, three such epics did win best picture. THR looks back at the movies and Schulman’s guidance on how they pulled off the W.

Titanic (1997)

$1.8B

Big box office back in 1997 and 1998 … and 11 Oscars.

The $200 million budget for James Cameron’s 1997 retelling of the sinking of the RMS Titanic — the largest ever for a movie at the time — led skeptics to believe the film, like its subject, would go under. “We had Time magazine with a headline that I think was, ‘Gulp, Gulp, Gulp,’ ” producer Jon Landau previously told THR. But as box office numbers continued to climb week after week, leading the film to become the first to reach the billion-dollar mark, its commercial success was undeniable. As was its critical acclaim when it won 11 out of the 14 Academy Awards for which it was nominated, including best picture. 

“I remember it as inevitable, as a coronation,” says Schulman of the win. “By the time Titanic got to the Oscars, it was this worldwide phenomenon.”

The film has been credited for the 70th Academy Awards being the most watched in Oscar history, with an estimated 87.5 million viewers tuning in for all or part of the broadcast. This despite the lack of a nomination for Leonardo DiCaprio, which reportedly led hundreds of enraged fans to make calls and send emails to the Academy demanding a recount. 

The level of fervor for Titanic was completely unmatched by its competitors in the top category — As Good as It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential — all without any actual campaigning, which wasn’t standard at the time, save for a small advertising run in print and free screenings for Academy members. Not that it needed the help. “You couldn’t miss Titanic,” Schulman notes.

Still, Cameron, who faced backlash for quoting the film in his acceptance speech for best director as he declared, “I’m the king of the world,” doesn’t assume everyone felt Titanic was the top choice for best picture. “Did we win by a landslide or did we win by one vote?” he posed to THR in 2023. “You never know.”

Gladiator (2000)

$466M

After a slow burn, the film took home five Oscars.

When Gladiator won best picture at the 73rd Academy Awards, it became the first film to do so without also winning either best director or best screenplay since 1949’s All the King’s Men. Up against Chocolat, Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the scale of the Russell Crowe vehicle, which became the second-highest-grossing film of 2000 at $465.5 million worldwide, gave it an edge with the Academy, even if was a bit of a slow burn.

“It wasn’t necessarily embraced when it came out. It was seen as a sort of cheesy swords-and-sandals throwback,” says Schulman, suggesting critical opinion shifted as box office grew. “It excites the industry because it reminds them of something that they’ve done well for a very long time. It hearkened back to Ben-Hur and Spartacus and got people excited about a revival of that genre, which then flowered.”

The push behind the Ridley Scott historical epic also marked a turning point in industry history, establishing the Oscar campaign that’s now become industry standard. “Campaigning is important for Gladiator because DreamWorks felt that they had been out-campaigned in 1999 with Saving Private Ryan and they were trying to out-campaign Harvey Weinstein using his playbook, and they did that and they won two years in a row for American Beauty and Gladiator,” Schulman explains. “Gladiator was the beginning of panel discussions; they rented out a theater for a week, and every night there was a different person from the film doing a discussion or introducing the film. A lot of the campaign infrastructure that we know now was really ramping up around then.”

The five Oscar wins Gladiator garnered in total also could bode well for its 2024 successor, Gladiator II — if voters don’t feel like they’ve rewarded it before. But the win 24 years ago could help any blockbuster.

Says Schulman, “The success of Gladiator at the Oscars reaffirmed Hollywood’s sense that big-budget spectacle was worth celebrating.” 

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

$1.1B

The third film topped the previous two at the box office on its way to going 11 for 11 at the Oscars.

Despite no best picture wins for the first two films in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, 2003’s The Return of the King won the Oscar at the 76th Academy Awards, to the surprise of even New Line Cinema’s then-president of theatrical marketing Russell Schwartz.

“We had the dreaded F-word,” he told Vanity Fair in 2014. “We were the fantasy movie, and there was no fantasy movie that ever won for best picture.”

Return of the King swept the ceremony overall, winning in all 11 of its nomination categories. That it beat out Lost in Translation, Mystic River, Seabiscuit and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World — films Schulman calls “ready-made best picture kinds of movies” — perhaps signals that the feat went beyond just that installment, which after grossing more than $1.1 billion worldwide became the highest-grossing film of 2003. In comparison, 2001’s The Fellowship of the Ring grossed more than $887 million and 2002’s The Two Towers $936 million.

“You get the sense that it was a win for the entire trilogy,” Schulman says. “The filmmakers were able to campaign on the enormity of all three movies together, which had come to a resolution.”

That there was a 20-year gap between the blockbuster wins of The Lord of the Rings and Oppenheimer is less about an aversion to commercial success on the part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and more an indictment of the kind of productions the industry now favors, Schulman believes.

“It speaks to the kinds of movies that Hollywood studios have been making,” he notes. “Over the past two decades, the industry has been sort of bifurcated between comic book blockbusters and smaller art house films. There hasn’t been much of an in-between.” 

This story appeared in the Dec. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.