‘Anora’ Is the Hero Gothams Need

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.

An autumn chill has descended. The early disappointment of Joker: Folie à Deux has nearly 3,000 teams feeling adrift, their spirit rattled. Where can the citizens of the Movies Fantasy League turn to for hope?

Suddenly, a beam of light hits the cloudy night sky, projecting the silhouette of a fat diamond ring. The Gotham Awards have just turned on the Anora signal.

Here we are in October, and the first award nominations of the season have already arrived, making this a point-heavy week for the MFL. If you’ve been patiently waiting for your roster to come alive, today offered sparks of activity for the 5,121 teams that chose Anora, the most-rostered movie in the league.

But while the Gothams were busy classing up the joint with cinematic excellence, multiplexes were dealing with everyone’s … favorite? … gloopy, overbearing symbiote one last time. Read on to see how the weekend-box-office returns and Gotham nominations threw our leaderboard for a loop.

Venom? I Hardly Know ‘Em!

After Joker’s belly flop, the standard for box-office disappointment has certainly been raised (lowered?). That resulted in less of a hue and cry over how Venom: The Last Dance performed this past weekend. It wasn’t great, though the film’s $51 million opening weekend was good enough to clear two bonus thresholds (+25 points) and finish No. 1 for the week (+20) for a grand total of 96 MFL points. But a quick look back at how the previous installment did in October 2021 — amid a far more COVID-depressed box-office environment — reveals that The Last Dance underperformed Venom: Let There Be Carnage by nearly half. After opening at $90 million, Let There Be Carnage rampaged its way to a $213 million domestic haul. That … isn’t going to happen this time around. This is what you get for letting Michelle Williams leave the franchise!!

Meanwhile, Smile 2 is also underperforming its predecessor, pulling in only $9 million in its second weekend (Smile did $18 million in its second week, albeit against weaker competition: Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile and Amsterdam). It has pulled in $40 million so far, which will still result in an okay return on investment for drafters.

On a smaller scale, the biggest box-office success of the weekend was arguably Conclave, which rounded up $6.6 million on under 2,000 screens. That makes it Focus Features’ second-best weekend of the year, after The Bikeriders’s opening weekend. Add to that a B-plus CinemaScore rating and it seems all systems are a go for a Best Picture push.

Speaking of Best Picture pushes, Anora played on 34 screens this past weekend and managed to bump its box-office total over $1 million, by far the biggest per-screen average of the weekend. That slow-and-steady platforming is accumulating great word of mouth (see below); it will be interesting to see how profitable this movie can be once it goes wide.

Other MFL notable tallies:

➼ We Live in Time cleared $10 million to remain in the top five in its third week of release.

➼ Joker: Folie à Deux continues its ignominious march toward oblivion, falling out of the top ten in its fourth week and pulling in only half a million dollars. That’s a scant $470 per screen, only avoiding the worst per-screen number in the top 15 thanks to Saturday Night averaging $7 less.

We All Need It, Can’t Live Without It … Gotham Nominations!

(We cannot allow the heinousness of R. Kelly to keep us from “Gotham City” puns.)

The Gotham Awards — the NYC-based movie awards ostensibly dedicated to honoring the best of the year in independent film — announced nominations in nine categories on Tuesday morning, including Best Feature, Lead and Supporting Performances, and Breakthrough Director and Performer. In other words, this is one of the best chances for your low-cost purchases to score some points.

So how did the indie flicks fare with the gurus of Gotham?

The big winner of the day — and I’d get used to hearing this — was Anora, which picked up four nominations (no other movie had more than three): Best Feature, Best Director (Sean Baker), Best Lead Performance (Mikey Madison), and Best Supporting Performance (Yura Borisov). That haul was good for 60 MFL points and a hearty start to the season. The Gothams also planted a flag for which of the film’s multiple worthy supporting performers ought to be the awards play, handing a supporting nomination to Borisov (the hot bald one) over co-stars Mark Eydelshteyn (the young one) and Karren Karagulian (the older one).

Finishing a robust second among MFL contenders with 45 points was the Sundance hit I Saw the TV Glow, which is exactly the kind of boost the Gothams should be providing. It may not be likely that I Saw the TV Glow will get traction at the other major precursors or the Oscars, but good on the Gothams’ nominating committees for recognizing the film in three categories: Best Director (Jane Schoenbrun) and a pair of richly deserved acting nominations for Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine.

Coming in third with 40 MFL points was Nickel Boys, a movie that may make a dent in the Oscar race but only if critics really champion it. Three nominations (Best Feature, Best Director, and a Breakthrough Performance nod for Brandon Wilson) are a good sign for anyone who drafted this powerful-but-not-at-all-typical film.

Somewhat surprising was The Brutalist and Brady Corbet not showing up in Best Feature or Best Director. If that movie and Anora are the indie front-runners waiting to see what Gladiator II brings to the table, Anora definitely won this round, even with The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce pulling in two nominations (and 30 MFL points).

It is also good to see Babygirl make as many Best Feature lineups as possible. Despite A24’s deeply crowded awards slate — the distributor had EIGHT films get at least one nomination yesterday (Babygirl, Challengers, A Different Man, I Saw the TV Glow, Sing Sing, The Brutalist, Janet Planet, and Love Lies Bleeding) — Babygirl could absolutely be a Best Picture nominee with a bit of audience enthusiasm and support from the critics. Thirty MFL points from Best Feature and Best Lead Performer (Nicole Kidman) nominations is a good start.

If your draft strategy included taking flyers on international films or documentaries, the Gotham nominations gave an indication as to where those races might head. All We Imagine As Light (+25 MFL points) won’t be an Oscar contender after getting snubbed by director Payal Kapadia’s native India, but that won’t stop it from racking up points on critics’ ballots. Meanwhile, No Other Land (+10) from tiny Antipode Films got the first of what may be many Best Documentary citations this season.

This Gothams lineup was also good news for:

➼ Challengers (+15), which got only one nomination, but it was for Best Feature, hopefully reminding awards voters that it exists and is a better movie than Luca Guadagnino’s other awards hopeful, Queer (seemingly the only A24 movie not nominated today).

➼ A Different Man (+30), which needs all the boost it can get considering it rides pretty deep on A24’s bench. Even if it doesn’t end up in the Oscars race, it’ll probably be better than at least half of the eventual Best Picture nominees, so good on the Gothams for giving it two nominations: a Best Feature nod as well as one for Adam Pearson in Best Supporting Performance. (Justice for lead actor Sebastian Stan, though.)

➼ Hard Truths (+25), nominated for International Feature and for Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s lauded lead performance. In fact, if you’re interested in the Best Actress race this year — and why wouldn’t you be? — it’s worth noting that Jean-Baptiste, Kidman, Madison, Demi Moore (The Substance), and Saoirse Ronan (The Outrun) were all nominated. They’d make for one hell of an Oscars lineup!

➼ Sing Sing (+30), another movie that risks spending too much time in the shadow of A24’s other contenders. Nominations for Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin are good bellwethers that this not-exactly-cheap MFL selection might still pay off.

➼ Pamela Anderson got a Best Lead Performance nominee for the poorly-received-in-Toronto The Last Showgirl, which should fuel Roadside Attractions’ campaign for her through the rest of this season.

➼ Danielle Deadwyler, who picked up a Best Supporting Performance nomination for The Piano Lesson despite the fact that the Gothams had already announced that they’d be giving the film a tribute award for its ensemble cast. The nominating committee made sure that Deadwyler’s work was singled out, providing the momentum she’ll need to sustain so that her 2022 snub for Till doesn’t repeat itself.

Other Oscar contenders like Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain), Brian Tyree Henry (The Fire Inside), and Natasha Lyonne (His Three Daughters) all saw their cases bolstered with nominations.

Leaderboard

With all these points getting thrown around, it makes sense that we’re finally seeing some separation on the leaderboard. There’s a lone roster at the top of the heap right now, LukeBart07, with 389 points. Congrats so far, LukeBart!

Every roster near the top of the standings has a similar base of ingredients: a combo of Venom and Smile 2 for box office, Anora for awards, and Joker: Folie à Deux to remind them that life isn’t always fair and success will be fleeting. LukeBart is getting a boost from the Gothams-approved trio of The Brutalist, The Substance, and Challengers (a triple feature I defy anyone to emerge from as the same person they were when they began).

Second and third place are separated by one scant point: Apollineb (377 points) and moodles (376 points). Apollineb got Gothams points from Babygirl, but it’s ironically the relatively meager box-office points from We Live in Time and Saturday Night that are providing the sliver of a lead over moodles’s The Brutalist–The Piano Lesson tandem.

Brennan Klein sits in fourth place with 374 points and a combo of Babygirl and The Substance. And in fifth place is Little Boston Oilers at 372 points with a roster simultaneously buoyed by The Brutalist and No Other Land and dragged down by the unholy combo of Joker AND The Apprentice.

Coming This Week

Three significant films open in limited release this weekend: Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which has Best Picture ambitions and a performance by Ronan; Here, a Forrest Gump reunion of Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and the uncanny valley; and A Real Pain, director Jesse Eisenberg’s Sundance hit that everybody thinks is going to land Culkin his first Oscar nomination (and maybe more). All that plus we get to see how much bigger Anora and Conclave will get. The season’s in full swing!

Questions? Feedback? Can’t find your team or mini-league on the leaderboard? Drop us a line at moviesleague@vulture.com.