Tarantino's 'Hollywood' Tops $200 Million, Cements Itself As The Year's Best Picture Oscar Frontrunner

With around $195 million worldwide as of Tuesday night, Sony's Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood should be just either over $200 million or within spitting distance. Quentin Tarantino's $90 million-budgeted ode to 1960's Hollywood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie (as Sharon Tate), has earned $116.4 million domestic, with a likely cume by Sunday night just over/under the $120.45 million cume (sans inflation) of Inglorious Basterds ten years ago.  By the end of the weekend, it should be over the $215 million worldwide cume of Pulp Fiction (back in 1994) to become Tarantino's third-biggest global grosser, beyond Basterds ($321 million) and Django Unchained ($424 million in 2012).

It's doubly surprising when you consider that it's not an action movie or a crime melodrama, but it's just a light drama mostly concerned with the day-to-day lives of its Hollywood protagonists. It also signals, however rare this triumph might be, that Tom Rothman's Sony can offer more than just Spider-Man movies and that they can successfully sell a big-budget, star-driven, filmmaker-specific hit even in an IP-friendly summer movie season. This win, with the final story admittedly still to be told (it opened with $53 million overseas last weekend, with market-to-market comparisons on par with The Revenant), undoubtedly played into Sony's willingness to let Peter Parker walk away from the MCU earlier this week.

What this also means, as the Fall festival season is about to kick into gear, is that, until further notice, Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is the year's Oscar front-runner. That is not to say that the various movies, big and small, premiering in Toronto, Venice, New York and elsewhere over the next months won't inspire rave reviews and strong awards season buzz and the like. Tarantino's flick already has one massive advantage over its competition: It's already a hit. Without being too doom-n-gloom about the prospects of any number of artistically promising movies, I can't say that any of the upcoming Fall flicks will, without question, break out.

Depressing as this may be, I'd argue the only surefire hit coming out of the festival circuit will be Todd Phillips' and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. That's no slam on a film which is allegedly very good, and there's a devilish part of me that wants to see a DC Films movie score a bunch of Oscars to watch the Internet burn. However, its box office prospects are a hell of a lot brighter than its relative competition, mostly because it's a comic book supervillain movie that looks good and is from well-liked brand (DC Films) and is centered on the most popular fictional villain of the modern era.

I hope that James Mangold's Ford v. Ferrari (starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale) and James Grey's Ad Astra (also starring Brad Pitt) can be the first big hits of Fox's lifespan as a Disney subdivision. I hope that the folks who flocked to Murder on the Orient Express two years ago do likewise (relatively speaking) for Lionsgate and Rian Johnson's Knives Out. However, in this Netflix/VOD environment, I'm firmly in "hope for the best but presume the worst" mode. Ditto Kasi Lemmon's Harriet Tubman biopic, Harriet, Marielle Heller's "Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers" biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Greta Gerwig's Little Women (both also from Sony).

That goes triple for the handful of old-school adult movies (The Goldfinch, Motherless Brooklyn, Just Mercy, The Good Liar, etc.) that Warner Bros. is desperately hoping don't follow in the footsteps of The Kitchen and Blinded by the Light. Ditto Sam Mendes' World War I actioner 1917 along with Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe's Queen and Slim (both courtesy of Universal) and Lionsgate's "downfall of Roger Ailes" drama Bombshell. It's possible these films (and many others that will make up the next four months of "awards season") will be excellent.  I can only hope that some of them can achieve some level of financial success.

However, last year saw an entire Oscar field get wiped out by two buzzy musical melodramas (A Star Is Born in October and Bohemian Rhapsody in November) and a "controversial" dramedy (Green Book) in January that attracted the vast majority of "we go to the movies once a month" crowd. Heck, Clint Eastwood's The Mule earned more ($172 million worldwide) in December/January than the vast majority of last year's seasonal awards contenders. Adults caught up with Green Book (which became the first Best Picture winner to crack $300 million worldwide since The King's Speech) in December and January and otherwise checked out The Upside while the Oscar contenders were fighting for scraps.

RIP, First Man, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, On the Basis of Sex, The Hate U Give, Mary: Queen of Scots, Vice and If Beale Street Could Talk, among others. It wasn't quite as bad in 2017, but Netflix, VOD and the like still did their number on the early favorites (The Battle of the Sexes comes to mind), and none of the "hits" (The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, The Post, etc.) cracked $200 million global. The contentious 2016 season produced two smashes (La La Land and Hidden Figures) along with two solid hits (Arrival and Hacksaw Ridge).

No, I'm not arguing that everything out of the awards season will die badly, and (save for maybe the two big Fox titles) none of these movies must pull even Hacksaw Ridge ($175 million worldwide)-level numbers to be a success. If I had to be optimistic, I'd offer hope for Ad Astra (space movies are still a thing), Ford vs. Ferrari (Disney has much to prove in turning that one into a hit), Knives Out and Little Women. However, I'd be pleasantly surprised if any of them put up numbers on par with wherever Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood ends up.

We could be looking at Once Upon A Time in Hollywood and its over/under $400 million cume as the lone Oscar-friendly biggie of the season, save for (presumably) Joker. That would further cement the film as the year's most aspirational picture. By that, I mean it would most represent the kind of film Academy members would aspire to make. That's the disadvantage that even acclaimed fantasy blockbusters/superhero movies like The Dark Knight, Inception, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II and Black Panther face. Nominees or not, Hollywood will keep making mega-budget fantasy action movies and/or franchise-friendly blockbusters no matter if they win acclaim and/or awards.

This isn't 2003 when The Lord of the Rings movies so towered above the competition (while differentiating themselves from even the standard Hollywood blockbuster) that Hollywood couldn't help but shower it with (well-deserved) nominations and Oscar victories. Films like Boyhood, 12 Years A Slave, The Shape of Water, even a simple two-hander racial drama like Green Book, those are the kinds of films that Hollywood would like to consider representative of what Hollywood can still make and still nurture to relative success alongside the tentpoles. Whether it's your favorite movie of the year or not, Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood fits this to a tee.

It's an original (loosely based within real history), star-driven, R-rated, adult-skewing, 2.5-hour character drama that may top $400 million despite containing a bare minimum of action, suspense and/or violence. It's from an acclaimed auteur, arguably the last one who can pull in big numbers for adult-skewing (non-horror, all due respect to Jordan Peele and non-fantasy, all due respect to Chris Nolan) melodramas even outside of the awards season. It's not brand exploitation; it's not a franchise revamp or a legacy sequel. It's "just" an old-fashioned, big-n-splashy studio programmer when "just a movie" is the most commercially challenging thing to be.

That it implicitly acts as Tarantino's farewell to his career as a director of theatrical movies and a farewell to the idea of theatrical films as a defining form of filmed entertainment, is just icing on the cake. Academy voters love movies about the movies and/or the media, be it Argo, Birdman, La La Land or Spotlight. The season hasn't even begun, but if the various festival darlings either don't click with critics and pundits or (more likely) don't click with paying consumers, it'll be hard to ignore the big movie that represents everything Hollywood wishes it could still do on the regular.

Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood may not be the best movie of the year, but it may best represent the aspirations, commercially and critically, of the industry which spawned it.

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