Precursor: 29th Producers Guild Nominations (2017)

The first thing one must remember about the Producers Guild of America is that they very much look at success as a portion of the measure of quality. Films that underperform, even with acclaim, are seldom recognized. They also tend to avoid films that don’t have some importance to the awards seasons. Further, if a film overcame a huge production hurdle to turn into a success, they like those as well. Here are their nominees, eleven in total (presumably a tie that probably included Molly’s Game, since it’s the most unusual pick on this list).

Looking at the current Oscar Best Picture contenders, the titles that missed out here are Darkest Hour, The Florida Project, Phantom Thread, Blade Runner 2049, The Disaster Artist, Logan, The Greatest Showman, and Mudbound. Of these, no one gave much consideration to either Disaster Artist or Greatest Showman, so their exclusions aren’t unexpected, especially after the latter underperformed with critics and audiences. Logan performed well, but this group tends to recognize only one superhero movie a year and Wonder Woman was not just a huge success, it was also a zeitgeist kind of film, something Logan was not. Blade Runner 2049 runs afoul of the success portion of the PGA’s measurements of quality, as it underperformed at the box office even with huge critical acclaim. Mudbound‘s sin is that it’s a Netflix production and thus never really made a go of the box office and there’s still some resentment towards Netflix’s abhorence of traditional release methodologies.

The three films that are hindered most by these announcements then are Darkest Hour, The Florida Project, and Phantom Thread. One look at the box office for two of them and you’ll understand why they were ignored. Darkest Hour opened to a mere $43k per screen average and has, to date, only amassed $21 million. Pair that with the weaker reviews and the film was bound to underperform. The Florida Project is a true indie and its $5 million tally is still quite good, but it opened to a meager $39k per screen, which isn’t great (compare that to Call Me by Your Name, which opened to $103K per screen average and will eclipse Florida in the coming weeks.

Now, let’s look at Phantom Thread. It too had a weak $54k per screen opening, but it’s also from a major Oscar player. Yet, it managed to pull in less than Inherent Vice‘s $65k and far less than The Master‘s $147k. This is, essentially, a disappointing opening for Paul Thomas Anderson. While the film has a lot of positive reviews, so do the other titles on this list and they only have so many slots.

Does this hurt all of their chances, Phantom could make it in on reputation and pedigree alone. Florida Project desperately needed this citation to stay in the race, so it’s probably on the ropes. Darkest Hour was probably done a long time ago, but this is pretty much a rebuke to anyone still with it on their prediction lists (like me).

The Awards

Best Picture

The Big Sick
Call Me by Your Name
Dunkirk
Get Out
I, Tonya
Lady Bird
Molly’s Game
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Wonder Woman