Academy Award nominations and wins generally spell boost in business for the films involved and this year’s Best Picture winner, Parasite, is no exception.
The film’s distributor Lionsgate is rushing to increase the film’s visibility in theaters this coming weekend by bumping the number of screens it will be available on to 2,000. This is almost double the amount of screens the South Korean feature is currently on.
The move comes in the wake of director Bong Joon Ho’s film becoming the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture honors at the Academy Awards. Additionally, the film clinched the Best International Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director categories.
Even with its easy availability now on home video and as a streamable download as of two weeks ago, people have been flocking to theaters to see Parasite. In the four weeks between it receiving six its Oscar nominations and this past Sunday’s four-Oscar sweep, the film brought in approximately $10 million at the box office. And now Fandango has reported that yesterday saw a 443% spike in ticket sales for the film on Monday, the day after its Oscar win, over the previous Monday.
Needless to say, there is plenty of money still on the table for Lionsgate and they are not about to walk away from it. So far the film has grossed approximately $35 million at the box office in the US, and experts are forecasting that haul to top out around $50 million after this coming week.
