Golden Globes New Categories Announces – Box Office and Comedy Special

According to Variety, the Golden Globes will now present two new categories:

The Golden Globe Awards will introduce two new categories to its upcoming January broadcast, Variety has learned exclusively. The categories will honor hit movies with global reach in either box office or streaming views, as well as acknowledge the best performance in a stand-up comedy special.

The first new prize is the Golden Globe for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. Eligible nominees will be among the year’s highest-earning or most-seen feature films that also deliver creative excellence.

Titles must have grossed at least $150 million during release, $100 million of which must have come from domestic box office. Streaming films with commensurate viewership will be considered based on data from “recognized industry sources,” the Globes said. Eight films will be eligible for that prize, and can also compete for categories like Best Motion Picture Drama or Comedy as long as they meet criteria for those fields.

The second new category, Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television, recognizes outstanding work from a comic in a traditional stand-up format (or as a breakout comic in a troupe or ensemble). Comedy specials airing on broadcast, basic and premium cable, streaming and pay-per-view cable will considered. Projects must have a recognized distributor and individual social media accounts will not be eligible.

Eight films will be up for the box office achievement award. At the moment, here are the films that have made more than $150 mil, according to Box Office Mojo:

1 Barbie $630m
2 The Super Mario Bros. Movie $574m
3 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse $381m
4 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 $359m
5 Oppenheimer $321m
6 The Little Mermaid $298m
8 Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania $214m
9 John Wick: Chapter 4 $187m
10 Sound of Freedom $183m
11 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny $174m
12 Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One $172m
13 Transformers: Rise of the Beasts $157m
14 Creed III $156m
15 Elemental $154m

I don’t know where to look for the most streamed movies so we’ll leave that out.

What they’re hoping to do with this category is bring more people in. And that might work. Barbie will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting this year no matter what category it falls in. Likely Barbie wins the box office award AND the Musical/Comedy award. Or maybe they split them and give The Little Mermaid the box office award and Barbie the Musical/Comedy award. That allows the chance to be inclusive as well as award Barbie.

Either way, it’s always fun for there to be a new category. My advice to the Academy is that they follow suit. Shrink Best Picture down to five and open up another category like they’ve done here to bring in more movies. They could also go in the opposite direction, award only films that were made under a certain budget.

We don’t know what other films will make that much money by year’s end, but here’s the predicted eight:

Barbie
Oppenheimer
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-VErse
The Little Mermaid
Dial of Destiny
Dead Reckoning
(then two from streaming…)

Ordinarily, the film that should be considered here, if they really want to change things for Hollywood and award shows, would be Sound of Freedom, an independent phenomenon that made more money than Indiana ones, and the Dial of Destiny and Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning.

Obviously, I know that’s not going to happen, and it would have happened even without the recent allegations made against the subject of the film, and the many attacks against everyone involved in the movie — I mean, it’s gotten so bad you’d think the movie was running for president against Joe Biden. It’s kind of shocking to see the attack machine go into overdrive when it feels threatened. Either way, there is no denying the film’s success, its quality, the strong performances at the film’s center — and, frankly, the unique opportunity to invite the half of the country the film industry has long since abandoned back into the room.

It’s a tough sell right now in the era of social media where anyone can become well known and famous for a certain group of people (most of Hollywood) to single itself out as separate from the others based on their ideological differences. It’s odd for them to behave as though they are entertainers for all of America when they are so clear that only care about a certain segment of America.

The only solution is for there to be a counterculture that rises up outside it, and Sound of Freedom is evidence that it’s not only possible but the train is already rolling in. The “gulag” on the other side of paradise.

To quote Milan Kundera:

“Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The rest of the story is over at Variety.