This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. The drafting window for this season has closed, but you can still sign up to get the newsletter, which provides a weekly recap of box-office performance, awards nominations, and critical chatter on all the buzziest movies.
Whether you believe in Santa Claus, M3GAN the doll, or the heron from The Boy and the Heron, certainly something is fixing to come down your chimney in a few days, so to give you more time to prepare for that terrifying eventuality, we’re going to blast through a quickie pool update.
Scroll on for updates on the preholiday box office and the Oscars shortlists!
Box Office: Across the Wonkaverse
Wonka made a decently impressive debut with a $39 million opening weekend domestically, putting it in the general range of this year’s Hunger Games movie, which is chugging along quite well. In a year when franchise projects have been bottoming out, the familiar IP of everyone’s favorite maniacal chocolatier was not exactly guaranteed to be a hit, but Timothée Chalamet, Hugh Grant, and a bunch of songs the advertising campaign most certainly did not want you to know about pulled through.
Elsewhere, The Boy and the Heron continued to perform well, with $23 million cumulatively earned at the box office so far. That’s an air of success that should benefit Hayao Miyazaki’s movie when it enters the Oscars race. Meanwhile, Poor Things got up to $2.2 million cumulative on only 82 screens, which could bode very well for its prospects when it expands.
Awards: Get Shorty (… Listed) (Sorry!)
We didn’t include the Oscars shortlists among the scoring categories last year, which was shortsighted. More so than the critics’ prizes, the Golden Globes, or even the guilds, these lists provide some real insight into where Oscars voters may be leaning. That’s good news for a lot of films that have become this season’s usual suspects: Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Poor Things. Barbie led the shortlist pack this week with 25 fantasy points, showing up on the shortlists for Sound and Original Score, and having three separate entries on the Original Song list. Killers of the Flower Moon is a sneaky contender on the Song list; Scorsese’s film was also among the finalists for Score, Sound, and Makeup.
More interesting, though, are the movies taking their first big stab at awards-season points here. The Netflix documentary about Jon Batiste, American Symphony, showed up on three lists (15 points). The John Carney movie Flora and Son got two songs on the shortlist. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny kept hope alive with spots on the Score and Visual Effects lists, while unfortunate box-office dud The Creator was a finalist for Sound and VFX. Last Voyage of the Demeter, The Killer, Golda, Rebel Moon, Flamin’ Hot (with a song written by Diane Warren!) — all getting their first points of the season.
International films and documentaries are also making their presence felt at last. 20 Days in Mariupol pulled shortlist placement in those categories, while films like Beyond Utopia, The Eternal Memory, The Taste of Things, Perfect Days, and The Mother of All Lies all got points.
Leaderboard
Barbie tingz and RobsFlicks remain locked in their eternal tie at the top of the leaderboard, but another duo approaches: Random Numbers and Ares are only a handful of points behind in (technically) third place. These two rosters are identical to each other and were boosted to the top echelon by those crucial ten points for 20 Days in Mariupol.
You can see the full leaderboard here on the main MFL landing page.
Looking Ahead
Folks, it’s Christmas. Time for a quick break! A ton of movies are opening over the next couple of weeks, including wide releases for The Color Purple, The Boys in the Boat, American Fiction, Ferrari, Migration, Anyone But You, and The Iron Claw. And in limited release: All of Us Strangers. Hopefully, we all get out to theaters once or twice and help make some of these movies hits. Then the Golden Globes are bearing down on us on January 7, so enjoy the break and get ready for this all to start churning once again. Thanks for a great 2023 for the Vulture Movie Fantasy League, and we’ll see you with another update in the New Year!
Questions? Feedback? Can’t find your team or mini-league on the leaderboard? Drop us a line at [email protected].
