Higher profiles
Life stories are like a box of chocolates… and 2023 is shaping up to be a year chock-full of biographical movies.
In the fallout of Oppenheimer-mania, Netflix has revealed the trailer for upcoming biopic ‘Maestro', directed by and starring Bradley Cooper as the famed composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Set to premiere in November, going head-to-head with Ridley Scott’s historic blockbuster ‘Napoleon’, Maestro will join some 15 biographical films that have been released so far this year.
If you’re not overly familiar with Bernstein’s work, which includes writing the score for the Broadway musical West Side Story, you’re not alone: Bernstein’s Wikipedia page has been viewed over 30,000 times in the past 24 hours.
Bi-epics
Since the Academy Awards began in 1929, biopics have received 126 Best Picture nominations, winning a total of 22. Actors also seem to fare better when they star in movie memoirs: performers playing real people have been nominated 359 times at the Oscars, with 8 of those in 2021 alone.
However, biopics have only recently started to match their critical acclaim with commercial success. Since 2010, 8 biographical movies have seen their protagonists win Best Actor — 4 of which, including 2019’s Bohemian Rhapsody, grossed over $100 million. In the 30 years before that, though, only 11 biopics scooped Best Actor Oscars, and not one of these met the $100 million threshold.
Ironically, the two highest-grossing movies to have received the Best Actor award, Forrest Gump in 1995 and Joker in 2020, both place a single character’s life story at the heart of the action, albeit a fictional one.
