Amazon MGM’s First Swing of ’26: Hit, Miss or TBD?
Plus: ‘Hamnet’ plays this year’s ‘Anora’ at the box office
Even before Covid, the idea of an “Oscar bump” at the box office for Academy Award nominees had become passé. However, with Focus Features’ best picture nominee Hamnet having one of its best weekends during its ninth week of release, it’s hard not to feel a little nostalgic for the ’90s-era phenomenon. The Chloé Zhao drama, one of just two best pic nominees still with a significant theatrical footprint — with Marty Supreme being the other — expanded to 2,000 screens over the weekend (from 718) and finished in eighth place, with a worldwide total of $42 million to date.
“If you were to tell me how it made $42 million globally back at Telluride (when it premiered), I think that people will be like, that’s a pretty good result,” Sean McNulty says.
Typically, Universal, which owns Focus, sticks to a short theatrical window (sometimes as little as 17 days) before putting its movies on PVOD. However, Hamnet remains a theatrical-only play, meaning it presumably has plenty of runway to add to its totals between now and the Oscars on March 15.
“It kind of reminds me of how Neon handled Anora last year,” Christopher Rosen says. The eventual best picture winner, which hit PVOD in December after two months of theatrical release in 2024, stayed in theaters through the Oscars and eventually added $5 million to its North American total, the biggest bump since Neon’s Parasite. (Nevertheless, Anora was one of the lowest-grossing best picture winners in the modern era.)
Hamnet was a feel-good story from the weekend, but the box office was topped by Mercy, the Amazon MGM AI thriller starring Chris Pratt that weathered bad reviews (21 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and worse weather around the country to earn $11.1 million, despite many anticipating it might only gross single digits.
“Number one at the box office, so there’s something to be said for that,” Sean says, noting the snowstorm that impacted multiple states likely kept the returns from going even higher. “You could have opened Dune 3 this weekend, and it would have been not as great as it could have been.”