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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 2015 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| E. L. James' 2011 trashy, erotic romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which sold over 100 million copies worldwide, was adapted into this 2015 controversially-sexy film directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, a highly-anticipated pop cultural phenomenon about a sado-masochistic relationship. Before its Valentine's Day release in 2015, the movie sold more advanced tickets than any other R-rated movie in history, and it was the widest R-rated opening ever (at over 3,600 theatres). The controversial film set a new February record with its $85.2 million opening weekend debut. It eventually earned $166.2 million (domestic), and a whopping $571 million (worldwide). It became one of Universal Pictures' highest grossing R-rated international releases, topping the previous original R-rated comedy, Ted (2012) (at $549.4 million). The movie, which cost $40 million, attracted an audience that was overwhelming female. It was clear that the film would spawn a few sequels - unusual for Hollywood which had recoiled for years from films about sex. Its effective advertising slogan was "Are You Curious?", although most of its reviews were critical and unfavorable. Initially, it was quite a phenomenon at the box-office (especially internationally), but then faltered due to horrible reviews and weak word-of-mouth. | |
| Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) won five 2016 Razzie Awards from its six nominations: Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Jamie Dornan), Worst Actress (Dakota Johnson), Worst Screen Combo (Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson), and Worst Screenplay (Kelly Marcel). Its sole non-winning nomination was for Worst Director (Sam Taylor-Johnson). | |
| Leonard Nimoy died at the age of 83. His most famous and iconic role was as Spock, the chief science officer of the USS Enterprise, during the series' original 3-season TV run from 1966 to 1969. He reprised the role in six of the Star Trek films (from 1979 to 1991) (two of which he directed), two episodes of "Unification" in the TV spin-off Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991), and he made quick appearances as Elder/Ambassador Spock (or Spock Prime) in the rebooted or relaunched Star Trek (2009) and its sequel Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). As a cerebral half-human, half-Vulcan with pointy ears, he was also known for certain catchphrases, "fascinating...", and "Live long and prosper." | |
| American Sniper (2014) eventually became the # 1 film (domestic) at the box-office for the year 2014, by March of 2015. It was in a tight race for the top spot with two previous # 1 placeholders, Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014). | |
| Sylvester Stallone served as writer-producer-actor in a 7th film in the Rocky franchise, director Ryan Coogler's Creed (2015). The upstart boxing progeny of Rocky Balboa's late rival Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), born-out-of-wedlock underdog Adonis "Donnie" Creed (Mchael B. Jordan), was coached by retired Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). Creed's opponent in the ring was undefeated boxing champion "Pretty" Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew). [Note: Apollo Creed died in a boxing match in Rocky IV (1985).] | |
| The Top 101 Funniest Screenplays ever written in Hollywood history were voted upon and released by the Writers Guild of America. The top 10 were Annie Hall (1977), Some Like It Hot (1959), Groundhog Day (1993), Airplane! (1980), Tootsie (1982), Young Frankenstein (1974), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Blazing Saddles (1974), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and National Lampoon's Animal House (1978). This new list was a subset of its decade-earlier list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays. | |
| According to the annual lists compiled by Forbes, Robert Downey Jr. was the highest-earning actor. He netted $80 million between June 2014 and June 2015, due in large part to his appearance as Iron Man in the second Avengers movie, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). This made him the world's highest-paid actor 3 years in a row. Jennifer Lawrence's earnings were $52 million, placing her at the top of Forbes' highest-paid actress list for 2015. | |
| As of 2015, the most successful sports film franchise was destined to be the Rocky films (from 1976 to the present day). The first six installments grossed a massive $565 million (domestic box-office revenue), with a seventh film titled Creed (2015), grossing an additional $80 million (domestic). | |
| Views of the trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015), within 24 hours of its October 19th release, numbered 16 million, watched during halftime on ESPN's Monday Night Football. Combined with the 112 million viewers that reflected all online platforms (including YouTube and Facebook), the total was 128 million views. The advance ticket sales also broke numerous records, including the biggest-ever 24 hours for advance sales in numerous countries. | |
| Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015) set a record for the biggest North American opening of all time (at $238 million domestic). The previous largest domestic opening was the summer's Jurassic World (2015) with $208.8 million. In addition, its global launch was $518 million ($279 million added to the $208.8 million), putting it in second place of all-time behind Jurassic World (at $524.9 million), which had the advantage of opening in China simultaneously. [The Force Awakens debuted in China - the world's second-largest moviegoing market later, on January 9th, 2016.] The $279 million international haul marked the third highest-opening of all time behind Jurassic World (at $316 million) and the final Harry Potter film (at $314 million). Other records that the new Star Wars film broke included largest Thursday previews, largest Friday (opening day, single day), highest per theater average (for a wide opening), top opening weekend for a PG-13 rated film, numerous December records (single day, opening weekend, largest second weekend, and widest December opening), fastest film to $100 million (in one day) and to $1 billion (in 12 days), and the highest-grossing (domestic) release of all-time at $936.7 million. | |
| British actor Christopher Lee passed away at the age of 93. He made more than 275 movies during a screen career stretching back to the 1940s. His most memorable villains included: the Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, UK) from Hammer Studios, Count Dracula in Horror of Dracula (1958, UK) (the first of many Dracula roles), the monstrous mummy Kharis in the Hammer horror film The Mummy (1959), Comte de Rochefort in The Three Musketeers (1973) (and in a trilogy of films from 1973 to 1989), the classic Bond villain Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005), and Gandalf's rival Saruman the White in The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. His star making role was in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968, UK). A few other memorable films in which he appeared included Sleepy Hollow (1999), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and as Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973, UK). | |
| American film director Randall Miller became the first filmmaker to go to prison on the charge of involuntary manslaughter for a film-related death, occurring in February of 2014. Industry experts speculated that this decision could discourage filmmakers from skirting rules and prompt greater scrutiny of safety issues. While filming the Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider, 27-year-old camera assistant Sarah Jones was killed. In the entire history of film-making, the first production-related death was in 1914 when 16-year-old actress Grace McHugh drowned and cameraman Owen Carter died trying to rescue her while filming a scene for the western short Across The Border (1914). In addition, more than 80 people have died in 52 fatal accidents while filming in the U.S. Two cases resulted in indictments, but none of those were convicted. The last time a manslaughter case went before a jury was nearly 30 years ago in 1982, in the infamous Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) case when actor Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed in an on-set helicopter accident, but director John Landis and four other co-defendants were acquitted of involuntary manslaughter in 1987 after a 10-month trial. | |
| Director Kenneth Branagh's live-action version of Cinderella (2015), 65 years after its animated predecessor, was Walt Disney's third venture in recent years to remake its classic animated storybook tales as live-action stories. Earlier adaptations included Alice in Wonderland (2010) with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter (59 years later), and Maleficent (2014) with Angelina Jolie starring as the vengeful fairy in the Sleeping Beauty (1959) tale, 55 years later. There were plans for more live-action remakes, such as The Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast in 2016. | |
| According to Variety, experts predicted that the People’s Republic of China would overtake the United States as the pre-eminent market for film by 2020. In 2014, US studios generated $2.16 billion at the Chinese box office, in part due to massive hits such as Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) and Interstellar (2014). Part of the problem, however, was that China currently allowed only 34 foreign films a year into its protectionist market. | |
| 2015 was again of year of many reboots, remakes, or sequels, to name a few: Jurassic World (2015), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015), Terminator: Genisys (2015), Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015), Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation (2015), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Furious 7 (2015), Creed (2015), and Spectre (2015). | |
| The reboot of Spielberg's Jurassic Park 'creature feature' films, Jurassic World (2015), set major box-office records. According to Universal Pictures, it grossed $208.8 million (domestic) on its opening weekend, topping the previous record-holder Marvel's The Avengers (2012) at $207.4 million. It had the biggest opening weekend debut of all-time. Also, its total worldwide opening at $524.1 million was the biggest global debut ever. It also crossed the $1 billion mark globally faster than any film ever. By the end of the summer, it had become the biggest summer movie moneymaker of all-time, at $647.4 million (domestic). | |
| The seventh installment in the Fast and Furious series (now a 14 year-old franchise), Furious 7 (2015) attained the status of most successful pure or real-world "action film," according to Forbes Magazine. The magazine article qualified the meaning of "action film" declaring that it didn't include either fantasy or costumed superhero films. If one took into account inflation and looked at adjusted gross incomes, Furious 7 was still one of the biggest box-office action hits in American box-office history, at $350 million. It trailed only the $607 million adjusted-grossing Thunderball (1965) (at $65 million unadjusted) and the $538 million adjusted-grossing Goldfinger (1964) (at $51 million unadjusted). If one broadened the range of "action films," it was also behind Top Gun (1986) ($390m/$179m) and The Fugitive (1993) ($360m/$184m). | |
| Furious 7 (2015) set a major box-office record for its opening weekend. With its remarkable $147.2 million debut, it was ranked 9th (at the time, although the rankings would soon change due to record-setting by other major blockbusters). The film's domestic launch was the biggest since The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), and one of the biggest movie launches in US history. [Note: Box-office records were made to be broken. Only a month later, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) scored a whopping $191.3 million on its opening weekend, and then Jurassic World (2015) another month later set another record with $208.8 million in its opening weekend.] Ultimately, Furious 7 grossed $1.5 billion and became one of the biggest movies of all-time, just behind Marvel's The Avengers (2012). | |
| A number of films didn't do as well as expected in the first half of 2015, including Cameron Crowe's Hawaiian dramatic comedy Aloha (2015), the feature-length TV adaptation Entourage (2015), the Wachowski's sci-fi action film Jupiter Ascending (2015), Mortdecai (2015) with Johnny Depp, the comedy Unfinished Business (2015) with Vince Vaughn, George Lucas' animated fantasy Strange Magic (2015) (with one of the worst openings in box-office history), director Michael Mann's action crime drama Blackhat (2015) starring Chris Hemsworth, and director Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi thriller Chappie (2015). | |
| After a poor summer season at the box office in 2014 (from May 1st to Labor Day), the film industry set its sights on eclipsing the $5 billion mark for the first time at the North American box office during the summer of 2015. [In actuality, it failed to materialize.] In the two previous years, the summer totals were: $4.85 billion in 2013 (the record), and barely $4 billion in 2014. There were promising film trends for 2015 beyond the summer, and it was possible that it would become the biggest year at the box-office in movie history, meaning it would be the first $11 billion North American box office -- with lots of hopefully potential monster hits including Universal's dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic World (2015), family films (and animations) including Pixar's Inside Out (2015), Universal's Minions (2015) and The Peanuts Movie (2015), fast cars in Furious 7 (2015), and franchise sequels or debuts including Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Terminator: Genisys (2015), Marvel's Ant Man (2015), Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation (2015), another Bond installment Spectre (2015), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015), and Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015). | |
| As things turned out by Labor Day, 2015's summer domestic totals were approx. $4.48 billion. It ran in second place in terms of summer grosses, behind the domestic totals for 2013. This was true, even though Jurassic World (2015) was the third largest movie ever. | |
| In 2015, minorities accounted for 45% of ticket sales during the year. | |
| By the end of 2015, a major domestic box-office record had been smashed. According to box-office totals, the yearly US domestic box-office total crossed the $11 billion mark for the first time in cinematic history, and ended at almost $11.2 billion. This record bested the previous yearly record of $10.9 billion in 2013. There were a number of tremendous box-office smashes during the year, including the year's top five films: Jurassic World (2015), Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Inside Out (2015), and Furious 7 (2015). | |
| Dinosaurs were the subject of at least four films in 2015: Jurassic World (2015), the Despicable Me spin-off Minions (2015), Pixar's The Good Dinosaur (2015), and Adam Spinks' 'found-footage' adventure thriller Extinction (2015, UK). | |
| Big-star name power did not always guarantee great box-office revenue. Examples of flops with big names in 2015 included: George Clooney in Tomorrowland (2015) (at $93 million, with a budget of $190 million), Channing Tatum in Jupiter Ascending (2015) (at $47 million, with a budget of $176 million), Adam Sandler in Pixels (2015) (at $79 million, with a budget of $88 million), Sandra Bullock in Our Brand is Crisis (2015) (at only $7 million), Meryl Streep in Ricki and the Flash (2015) (at $27 million) and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in By the Sea (2015) (at only $538,000). Some of the biggest flops of the year (with and without stars) were Victor Frankenstein (2015) (at $5.7 million), Pan (2015) (at $35 million, with a budget of $150 million), Burnt (2015) (at $13.6 million), Jem and the Holograms (2015) (at $2.2 million), and Rock the Kasbah (2015) (at $3 million). | |
| One of the reasons for the decline of original programming was that mass audiences were not supporting movies that were not sequels, remakes, reimaginings, spinoffs or an adaptation of a young adult novel. And because the multiplexes were crowded with major franchise films, smaller, indie movies were being edged out - and were appearing in other places, such as on Netflix and other VOD services (without a theatrical release). Filmmakers and studios were also being more careful about sensitive or offensive subjects, especially after the hack of Sony by N. Korea in the previous year - thereby causing some film ideas or projects to be either censored or heavily edited. | |
| A major trend that emerged was the proliferation of alternate TV-watching subscription services (and online streaming) by major outlets, and the growth of Internet-delivered TV. By mid-2015, about 7% of all US households (about 8.4 million) subscribed to broadband service and at least one streaming video service (or OTT, an acronym for over-the-top), but did not subscribe to pay TV. Statistically, about 56% of all US households had at least one Internet-connected TV. Cable companies were finding that pay-TV subscribers were cancelling, while others were signing up for broadband. Consumers were sending a clear signal - they did not want cable packages of 200+ channels (most of which they didn't watch or need) - and were becoming "cord-cutters," preferring instead to have a la carte approach to television subscription plans. Many stand-alone OTT products (from studios, networks, and even satellite pay-TV services) were being offered as alternatives, from many sources: DISH Networks' Sling-TV, Comcast, Netflix, Nickelodeon, HULU, Amazon Prime, HBO NOW, ESPN, CBS-All Access, Showtime, Apple, Starz, SONY's PlayStation Vue, and Lionsgate. This new development was just enough to encourage more pay-TV/cable service subscribers to drop their cable services. However, TV viewers had to take into consideration that a fast Internet connection would still be required (without the TV/cable bundling discount to defray the cost). | |
| Although streaming services (such as Netflix and Amazon) were making inroads with some of their programming choices (e.g., Netflix's House of Cards and Amazon's Transparent), there were no break-out hit movies. The closest the services came to bona-fide hits in 2015 were Spike Lee's Chi-Raq (2015) (at $2.6 million) (it was Amazon's first theatrical release) and Netflix's and director Cary Fukunaga’s child-soldier drama Beasts of No Nation (2015) (at only $91,000). In fact, Beasts of No Nation (2015) was Netflix's first feature-film release. | |
| During the year, a number of the top films featured female protagonists, including Cinderella (2015), Pixar's Inside Out (2015), Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Grandma (2015) (Lily Tomlin), Sicario (2015) (Emily Blunt), Suffragette (2015) (Carey Mulligan), 45 Years (2015) (Charlotte Rampling), Joy (2015) (Jennifer Lawrence), Brooklyn (2015) (Saoirse Ronan), Carol (2015) (Cate Blanchett), Room (2015) (Brie Larson), and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) (Charlize Theron). | |
| Director Elizabeth Banks' Pitch Perfect 2 (2015) was the highest-grossing movie directed by a female in 2015, with a domestic gross of $184.3 million. Second was Sam Taylor-Johnson's Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) at $166.2 million. | |
| The world's first action movie, shot entirely using GoPro Hero3 Black Edition cameras, was director/co-writer Ilya Naishuller's Hardcore Henry (2015). It was filmed in Russia, and was entirely shot from the POV of the main protagonist. Part of its funding came from crowd-funding at the site Indiegogo. | |
| Three of the biggest films of the year bypassed established movie stars and fronted their casts with TV stars. Jurassic World (2015): Park And Recreation’s Chris Pratt, Terminator Genysis (2015): Game Of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke, and Fantastic Four (2015): House Of Cards’ Kate Mara. | |
| Director Quentin Tarantino's western The Hateful Eight (2015) (distributed by The Weinstein Company) was reputedly the widest 70mm release the industry has seen in more than 20 years. It was filmed entirely in 70mm (Ultra Panavision 70), a rare widescreen format usually reserved for big-screen epics. | |
| Director Sean Baker's comedy/drama Tangerine (2015) was filmed exclusively on three iPhone 5s smartphones. It was also an unusual film that focused on a day in the lives of two transgender sex workers/prostitutes: Mya Taylor (as Alexandra) and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (as Sin-Dee). Both leads were transgender females in real-life. | |
| Some film offerings were catering to older (or "gray") audiences (who were attending arthouse and independent films in large numbers), with older stars to identify with, such as director Andrew Haigh's romantic drama 45 Years (2015, UK). The drama starred 79 year-old Tom Courtenay and 70 year-old Charlotte Rampling as a couple struggling with issues surrounding their 45th wedding anniversary. | |
| Spirited, red-haired, Irish born actress Maureen O'Hara died at the age of 95. She was known as "The Queen of Technicolor" for playing strong-willed, tempestuous women - flashing her red hair, bright green eyes, and flawless complexion. She had appeared in many films of the 1940s and 1950s, including her first Hollywood film The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as haunted gypsy girl Esmeralda opposite Charles Laughton's Quasimodo. Other films included: the Best Picture-winning How Green Was My Valley (1941), in which she was memorable as a Welsh mining family's daughter, Jean Renoir's war drama This Land Is Mine (1943), and the holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Her best-remembered color film was director John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952), the 2nd of five movies starring opposite John Wayne, as proud, stubborn, and passionate Irish female Mary Kate Danaher. Other notable films were: The Black Swan (1942), Buffalo Bill (1944), The Spanish Main (1945), Sinbad the Sailor (1947), Bagdad (1949), Rio Grande (1950), Against All Flags (1952), The Parent Trap (1961), Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), and Spencer's Mountain (1963). | |
| Horror master film director/writer/producer Wes Craven died at the age of 76. He was best known for creating the A Nightmare on Elm Street horror film franchise, introducing the character of Freddy Krueger. He directed two of the films: the original supernatural slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and the 7th film Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994). Craven was also noted for the Scream film franchise - he directed all four Scream films from 1996 to 2011, and co-created the character of Ghostface. His other best films included: the controversial The Last House on the Left (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Deadly Blessing (1981), Swamp Thing (1982), Deadly Friend (1986), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988),The People Under the Stairs (1991), Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), and Red Eye (2005). | |
| By the end of the summer of 2015 (in record time), Universal Pictures had already grossed more revenue than any other studio ever had in a single year. It easily surpassed 20th Century Fox's total of $5.52 billion last year, with three major blockbusters for the year: Jurassic World (2015), Furious 7 (2015) and Minions (2015). Two other very successful Universal films were: Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), and Fifty Shades of Grey (2015). | |
| Spectre (2015), the 24th James Bond film, marked the fourth time for Daniel Craig as 007, and the second film to be directed by Sam Mendes. The film's title SPECTRE referred to a tentacled criminal organization. The new generation representing the MI6 team included actors reprising their roles: Ralph Fiennes (M), Naomie Harris (Eve Moneypenny), Rory Kinnear (Tanner) and Ben Whishaw (Q). The main Bond villain was Franz Oberhauser / Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) - the sponsor of past foes (Le Chiffre, Mr. White, and Silva), and the two main Bond Girls were Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) and Lucia Sciarra (Monica Bellucci). The film's pre-title stunt was a helicopter hijacking over Mexico City during a Day of the Dead celebration. With a production budget of $245 million, Spectre's opening weekend at $70.5 million was the second-highest debut in the series' history (behind Skyfall (2012) and its $88.4 million opening weekend). | |
| After an out-of-place $45 million Heineken promotion in Skyfall (2012), the Bond franchise decided to cut back on product placements in Spectre (2015). Bond did not carry a smartphone, rejecting offers from both Sony and Samsung made earlier in the year (both offered $5 million for the product placement, and $18 million/$50 million respectively for an exclusive deal). The offers were rejected by Bond actor Daniel Craig and director Sam Mendes, after judging the phones to be uncharacteristic for Bond. | |
| Spectre (2015) was awarded a Guinness World Record for the largest stunt explosion ever in cinematic history, lasting more than 7.5 seconds. The scene (in the film's climax) that earned the award involved the explosion of a massive underground structure occurred while Bond (Daniel Craig) and Bond girl Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) looked on from a distant hilltop. The stunt was filmed in Erfoud, Morocco, during June 2015, and required 8,140 liters of kerosene fuel and 24kg of high explosive charges (according to a taped interview with the film's explosives stunt crew). Guinness noted that the stunt explosion had a total yield of 68.47 tons of TNT equivalent. | |
| The first feature-length version (in many decades, since Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (1980)) of Charles M. Schulz's beloved creation Charlie Brown, was found in The Peanuts Movie (2015). It was the fifth full-length feature film to be based on the comic strip, and its release commemorated the 65th anniversary of the comic strip and 50th anniversary of the TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). It used a photorealistic 3-D background for the cartoon characters. | |
| Pixar/Disney's The Good Dinosaur (2015) marked the first time that Pixar released two feature films in the same year. Its earlier 2015 film was the massive hit Inside Out (2015). It was the third Pixar film without Academy Award nominations - its two predecessors with the same fate were Monsters University (2013) and Cars 2 (2011). | |
| 73 year-old Harrison Ford was named the highest-grossing movie actor in Hollywood history, due to Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). His filmography of 41 movies grossed a total of $4.7 billion, with The Force Awakens accounting for $770 million of the total. The previous actor with the title of highest-grossing was Samuel L. Jackson with 68 films that had a combined gross of $4.6 billion. | |
| R-rated comedies were not doing as well as expected, although there were two major R-rated hits: Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (2015), and Melissa McCarthy in Spy (2015) - both at about $110 million. A number of gross-out comedies that didn't do as well as expected in 2015 included: Vacation (at $59 million), Ted 2 (at $81.5 million) and The Night Before (at $43 million). The most successful comedy of the year (PG-13 rated) was Daddy's Home (at $148 million). | |
| The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) was criticized almost immediately for its white-centric performance Oscar nominations (for the second year in a row) - all 20 of its acting nominees were white. This marked the first time since 1998 that the Academy in back-to-back years did not nominate a single black performer. | |
| Jennifer Lawrence received her 4th Oscar nomination (it was her 3rd Best Actress nomination) for her role as self-made Miracle Mop inventor/millionaire Joy Mangano, in David O. Russell's semi-autobiographical dramedy Joy (2015). At age 25, Lawrence became the youngest performer (actor or actress) to receive 4 Oscar nominations. She bested Jennifer Jones, who received her third Best Actress nomination (for Duel in the Sun (1946)) (and fourth Oscar nomination) at the age of 27. | |
| 69 year-old Sylvester Stallone received his third Oscar nomination for a reprisal of his role as boxer/trainer Rocky Balboa, mentoring deceased Apollo Creed’s son (Michael B. Jordan) in director Ryan Coogler's sports drama Creed (2015) (the 7th Rocky film, considered both a spin-off and a sequel). Previously, Stallone was nominated twice for Rocky (1976): Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actor. With his Creed nomination, Stallone became the fifth actor (and sixth performer) in Oscar history to have been nominated twice for playing the same character in two different films. Previous dual nominees include Bing Crosby in 1944 and 1945, Paul Newman in 1961 and 1986, Peter O'Toole in 1964 and 1968, Al Pacino in 1972 and 1974, and Cate Blanchett in 1998 and 2007. Stallone's nomination also set a record for the most years between nominations for portrayals of the same character in different films - at 39 years. | |
| Two major blockbusters of the year: Jurassic World (2015) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), received no Academy Award nominations. Both box-office hit films surpassed The Dark Knight Rises (2012) as the highest-grossing movies of all time to be snubbed by the Oscars. Also, the major franchise of three Hunger Games films (2012-2015) officially became the highest-grossing franchise of all time to not receive a single Oscar nomination. | |
| The Best Picture winner, the ensemble film Spotlight (with six nominations and two wins, including Best Original Screenplay) was a journalistic-procedural drama about the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal. The last film to win Best Picture and just one other Oscar was director Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Although a number of journalism-themed films in Oscar history have received lots of nominations, including Best Picture (e.g, Network (1976), All the President's Men (1976), The Killing Fields (1984), Broadcast News (1987), and Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005)), Gentleman's Agreement (1947) was the last journalism-related film to win Best Picture. It was the second lowest domestic-grossing film ever to win Best Picture (at $39.1 million at the time of the award), compared to $17 million for The Hurt Locker (2009). | |
| With his Best Director Academy Award win for The Revenant (2015), 52 year-old Mexican-born Alejandro Iñárritu became the first person in 65 years and only the third ever to win back-to-back Best Director Oscars since Joseph L. Mankiewicz's A Letter To Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), and only the third in history, also after John Ford's The Grapes Of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941). |
