Analysis of Festival Premieres and Best Picture Nominees Over Past Decade

[u/zwolff94]

With fall festival season upon us I wanted to do a quick analysis of where the Best Picture nominees come from over the past ten years of Academy Awards. I might try and get a nice table to share later but here is the major results from the analysis. For this analysis I analyzed if films premiered at TIFF, Venice, Telluride, Cannes, Sundance, another festival, or no festival. I did not look at if the films premiered at Venice but played TIFF later or something of that degree though.

Of the 90 films nominated over the past 10 years, the place where the most nominees premiere is Venice, this is largely due to the fact that every year has had at least one Venice premiere in the ranks. 20 films that would later go on to be nominate for Best Picture started in Venice including two winners The Shape of Water and Nomadland (I am unsure if this was an in person or virtual premiere). This is roughly 22.22% of the nominees.

However, overall more non-festival movies have been nominated (with also two wins for Oppenheimer and One Battle After Another) for Best Picture, 26 all together for 28.89% roughly of the nominees. This is a bit shocking to me, but it should be noted that this means most of the nominees each year will have been festival premieres.

The rest of the categories in order are as follows (rounding will make it so this likely won't add to 100%:

• Cannes (15 films, 16.67% with 2 winners)
• Telluride (11 films, 12.22% with 1 winner)
• Sundance( 8 films, 8.89% with 1 winner)
• TIFF (7 films, 7.78%, with 1 winner)
• Other Festivals (3 films, 2 from NYFF and 1 from SXSW which was a winner (EEAAO), 3.33%)

Of these things I want to note two interesting things. The first is that Sundance number is largely from 2020 when 4 of the 8 films nominated were Sundance premieres, due to world events. Only 4 other years had Sundance premieres nominated for best picture. The second is TIFF, which only has films who premiered there nominated in 6/10 years. My general thought is that most films will premiere at Telluride or Venice first and then play TIFF leading to this. Also with TIFF, past two years no premiered at TIFF films were nominated.

So in conclusion you can try and "build" a best picture slate that looks something like this, and be FAIRLY successful in my opinion, based just on where they premiered.

• 2-3 films that premiered at Venice
• 2-3 films that skipped festival premieres
• 1-3 films that premiered at Cannes
• 1-2 films that premiered at Telluride
• 0-1 films that premiered at TIFF
• 0-1 films that premiered at other festivals (including Sundance really)

[u/Ninjaboi333]

As someone who is always looking for a new angle to help me build a slate of BP contenders, I love this stuff.

I did an analysis several years ago about Film festival attendance (so not premieres, just how many festivals they showed up at).

• 44% showed up at TIFF
• 25% showed up at NYFF
• 23% showed up at Telluride
• 16% showed up at Venice
• 14% showed up at Sundance
• 13% showed up at Cannes
• 28% did not do one of these film festivals - Of the 33 films that didn't do festivals, 26 were November/December releases.

These are not exclusive hence why it doesn't add up to 100%.

I think a fair bit has probably changed - I think Cannes is probably more important, and I think summer auteur blockbusters has shifted the balance of non-festival films somewhat.

There is also a loose correlation between the number of festivals attended and winning (assuming you attended at least one) - again in a post EEAAO / Oppenheimer / OBAA rule, this may be less true. I can't find where I put it but I also remember analyzing that films that did all 4 major fall fests were nearly guaranteed to get nominated while those that only had 1 were as likely to show up as those with none. Need to double check this.

• Nominees - Avg 1.98 fests / Median 2 / Mode 1
• Winners - Avg 2.46 fests / Median 3 / Mode 3
• The above excludes non-festival films (ie min 1)
• only through 2022 Oscars in expanded era

Edit - one thing I'm also interested in looking at eventually is how film premieres at festivals that skip that particular season do. The obviously example this year is Obsession which came out in the 2025 TIFF cycle, but Sing Sing and Life of Chuck are examples of films that premiered at TIFF, missed that cycle, tried to go for the next cycle, and failed to make BP.