Sinners, One Battle After Another Oscar Campaigns Collide at Warner Bros

Warner Bros. is having the kind of Oscar season most studios dream about, and publicity teams may quietly dread.  

The studio is backing the two clearest best picture contenders of the year: Paul Thomas Anderson’s action epic “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama “Sinners.” It’s an embarrassment of riches, but one that can also lead to some awkward situations. How do you push two films this hard without having it look like you’ve already decided which one you want voters to crown?  

In Oscar season, perception matters almost as much as momentum. Voters are allergic to being “told” what to do, and nothing raises eyebrows faster than the idea that a studio has settled on its favorite candidate in the race. That means Warner Bros. has to take pains to ensure that the campaigns for both films are equal.   

That means equal budgets, equal statements of support and equal attention paid to the two contenders. Did I mention the word “equal?” Every screening invite, every trade ad, and every quote from an executive is scrutinized by the personal publicists repping the talent behind the films (and sometimes the filmmakers themselves). Those reps are also constantly reading between the lines, looking for clues to determine whether, deep down, Warner Bros. really does have a favorite.  

It’s a balancing act. However, for much of the season, the race didn’t look like much of a race at all.  

“One Battle After Another” jumped out early and never really slowed down, racking up critics’ prizes at a pace that suggested inevitability. The film has won 35 major critics’ and guild awards, including a sweep of National Board of Review, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. It’s a rare feat achieved only by “Schindler’s List” (1993), “L.A. Confidential” (1997) and “The Social Network” (2010).

And then came Oscar nomination morning.  

Overnight, Coogler’s “Sinners” transformed the entire season when the film scored a record-setting 16 Oscar nominations, the most in Academy Awards history. What once looked like an inevitable coronation for PTA became an honest-to-goodness coin flip for a possible historic victory for what could be the first Black director to ever win the category. The once-deemed juggernaut now suddenly has a true rival from its cinematic cousin from across the lot. That’s left WB, strategists and publicists managing expectations… and egos.

“You can’t pick a horse,” one awards strategist familiar with the campaigns tells Variety. “The entire studio has to walk an incredibly fine line.”  

That pressure doesn’t ease once envelopes start opening — if anything, it intensifies. Awards publicists and strategists describe the job as “being Switzerland in real time,” maintaining the same neutral body language, applause level and tone regardless of category or contender status. Filmmakers and their teams notice everything: Who clapped first, who cheered loudest, who seemed most animated. In a race this tight, even a split-second reaction can be read as favoritism, and those perceptions can linger long after the telecast ends. 

To be clear, neither Anderson’s camp nor Coogler’s believes one film has been favored over the other. If anything, both teams — along with studio insiders — describe a genuine mutual admiration between the two auteurs, who are visibly friendly whenever they cross paths on the circuit. 

The situation that Warner Bros. finds itself in is rare. The most recent modern example of the same studio steering the undisputed two frontrunners came in the 2017 season, when Searchlight Pictures (then Fox Searchlight) campaigned both Martin McDonagh’s crime drama “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and eventual best picture winner “The Shape of Water,” the romantic fantasy film from Guillermo Del Toro. Coincidentally, that same season brought another major industry turning point: The Walt Disney Co. announced its acquisition of 21st Century Fox on Dec. 14, 2017. 

Before that, you have to go back to 1974, when Paramount Pictures steered Francis Ford Coppola’s epic sequel “The Godfather Part II” and Roman Polanski’s neo-noir “Chinatown,” with the former ultimately prevailing.  

You can find other cases throughout history. United Artists pulled it off in 1961 with the winning musical “West Side Story” and the legal drama “Judgment at Nuremberg.” And WB had this occur on another occasion when shepherding two major contenders in the good ol’ days with 1948’s “Johnny Belinda” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” — only to watch Universal’s “Hamlet” walk away with the best picture statuette.  

What separates this year from those earlier examples is the money involved. Modern Oscar campaigns are nothing like they were in the golden age of Hollywood. They operate more like political races with multimillion-dollar budgets. And there’s a cottage industry of analysts and bloggers assessing their every move. Studios in the 1970s could afford to be hands-off. But today, everything is measured — sometimes literally — down to the size and placement of For Your Consideration ads.  

According to sources with direct knowledge, both awards campaign budgets for “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” this year range between $14 million and $16 million apiece and are nearly equal to the dollar amount. 

And that’s what Warner Bros. needed to do: keep budgets aligned, screening calendars balanced and publicity efforts evenly distributed. Even the order in which the films appear in press materials can become a talking point.  

One publicist from another rival studio says, “No matter how ‘cool’ your filmmakers are, they notice what one person gets, and another doesn’t. This business runs on relationships. Even when your ‘contender’ isn’t really a contender, you keep pushing until the race says otherwise.” 

WB’s massive year has given the lot a much-needed morale lift at a moment of real uncertainty. By tying the studio’s all-time record for most Oscar nominations in a single year, the campaign has become a unifying rallying point internally. While separate in-house teams are assigned to Anderson’s and Coogler’s films, sources say the unit heads and their staffs have embraced the contest — rooting hard for their own titles, but just as visibly cheering wins, momentum and milestones across the entire Warner slate.

There’s also a layer of irony hanging over this moment. The awards-season dominance comes as Warner Bros. faces an uncertain future amid its pending sale to the streaming giant Netflix. The idea of a best picture showdown between two Warner releases feels both celebratory and, in its own way, like a farewell tour.  

One studio executive says: “It’s like throwing yourself the world’s best going-away party.”