When Hollywood Success Is A Fantasy

The entertainment awards season kicked off this week, and as one might imagine, very few of the 41st People’s Choice Awards winners from Wednesday will take to the podium a second time on Sunday at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards.

The Golden Globes are well known for their convivial awards ceremony, but they’re hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and hold a critical cachet that belies the drunken speeches. As opposed to years past, the lack commercial success of this year’s critical favorites is more likely to leave studio executives feeling hungover.

As this Reuters graphic shows, the world’s 20 highest-grossing films in 2014 were dominated by superheroes, science fiction, fantasy and a vindictive fairy. Of the list, 19th place Gone Girl’s four nominations made it the only film in the running for more than one Golden Globe. Even the bookish titles on the list—the final installment in Peter Jackson’s treatment of The Hobbit trilogy and the biblical blockbuster Noah—were more epic more than literary.

Nominations for the 87th Academy Awards are expected to follow form when they are announced next week. Studios often release award-expectant films to small audiences late in one calendar year in order to make them eligible for the next year’s Academy Awards, with the hope that a raft of nominations (and wins) will provide an ‘Oscar bump’ at the box office, so there is still hope for movies like Selma.

But the studios are shrewd, and if they perceive a film as a winner at the theaters and on the awards stage, they will release it to as wide an audience as possible. This year’s dichotomy between popular and critical acclaim is a bit of an outlier; past years’ lists of popular favorites have included more movies with intellectual heft, but for audiences, the breadth of 2014′s crop of films provides a little bit for everybody.