Updated on December 14, 2017 at 8:20 am, now that the deal has indeed become a reality.
Okay, for the record, the Golden Globes are not the Oscars. And that goes for the countless other critic-group awards and guild awards that preceded and are dissected for clues to the annual Academy Awards. Those nominations will drop on Jan. 23, 2018. But if the Golden Globes nominations are any indication, give or take possible technical nods, the biggest winner, especially among the major studios, will be Fox and Fox Searchlight.
Thanks to The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Fox Searchlight earned a whopping 15 nominations. And not to be outdone, 20th Century Fox rode The Post and The Greatest Showman and to 12 nods. That's a combined 27 nominations, which is 27 more Golden Globe nods than Walt Disney earned this morning. The reason that matters is that Walt Disney is buying Fox.
I discussed last week how the combined might of Disney and Fox would potentially allow the Mouse House to corner the market on family-friendly four-quadrant tentpoles AND adult-skewing prestige fare/studio programmers. But it stands to reason that A Mouse House that doesn't bury Fox and/or Fox Searchlight and continues to allow them to distribute movies like The Post and The Shape of Water could be as much a force of nature in the year-end awards race as they are at the global box office.
Now every year sees a new batch of nominees and every year brings new opportunities to fly or flail. Lionsgate, with or without CBS Films and Summit, had a jaw-droppingly good award season last year thanks to La La Land, Hacksaw Ridge and Hell or High Water. But this year, they are banking almost entirely on The Big Sick and (potentially) Wonder for Oscar love. Conversely, Paramount/Viacom Inc. Oscar run in 2016 (Arrival, Fences, Florence Foster Jenkins, etc.) which was little comfort in a box office year from hell.
But over the last several years, Fox and/or Fox Searchlight have made themselves a staple of the Oscar race. Fox Searchlight has released three Best Picture Oscar winners (Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years A Slave and Birdman) in just the last ten years, while they have boasted multi-nominee (and often Oscar-winning) gems like Jackie, Brooklyn, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Descendants and Black Swan. And 20th Century Fox has made a decent showing of late with the likes of Hidden Figures, The Revenant, Gone Girl and Life of Pi.
Moreover, most of Fox Searchlight's Oscar offerings have been relatively successful in terms of global box office grosses, so say nothing of a movie like The Revenant topping $500 million worldwide or Gone Girl snagged $366m global. One of the big questions if this deal goes through, a question far more important than whether or not Loki has a beer with Dr. Doom in an MCU movie, is just what happens to all of those prestigious but not necessarily blockbuster-y Fox movies distributed either by Fox itself or by Fox Searchlight. Either Disney stays the course on that score and becomes, via the Fox movies and the tech category-friendly Disney biggies, a huge Oscar player or those films end up going to Lionsgate or A24.
Of course, the doomsday scenario is that stuff like The Post or Brooklyn don't get made/released. But one of the best things about the Oscar season is that it almost single-handedly keeps movies like that in the theatrical distribution pipeline. I'm not going to say that the Oscar season is the only reason the major studios distribute "good" old-school movies, but it's certainly one of the only reasons in this current environment. The optimist says that Disney will let Fox keeping doing its thing in order to more fully control the theatrical marketplace in multiple moviegoing demographics, with market share being more important than the profitability of a singular Beasts of the Southern Wild or Jackie.
So the question is now whether Disney cares enough about prestige and Oscar glory to keep putting out (relatively profitable) films like The Grand Budapest Hotel. That might not be good news for Lionsgate or A24, but a Disney as (relatively speaking) committed to Oscar glory as it is to global box office/pop culture dominance might be a good thing for folks who still like seeing movies like Black Swan in theaters. Like everything associated with this potentially mammoth and game-changing deal, there's some potentially good news and some potentially bad news.
