99th Oscars Projections: Summer Blockbuster Season Update

A Look During The Summer Blockbuster Season At The Best Picture Race Outlook For The 99th Academy Awards

Jul 24, 2026

Introduction

Merely a few weeks have passed since my last projections update on the outlook for the Best Picture race at the 99th Academy Awards, and yet it already feels like the race has undergone some dramatic shifts.

For one, The Odyssey finally premiered and got exactly the reception I needed to see to believe it remains the movie to beat at this early stage of the season. It earned critical acclaim, box office success, and its giving Project Hail Mary a run for its money for the best audience scores of the year. The Academy has already hosted a few screenings for it, and word is the film was a massive hit with those who attended those.

The question now is whether The Odyssey will be Oppenheimer from 2023, which took the frontrunner status from Killers Of The Flower Moon after “Barbenheimer” weekend and held it all the way to Oscar night, or whether it will be Dunkirk in 2017, which emerged from the summer as the movie to beat only to become an also-ran once the fall festivals gave everyone shiny new toys to chase.

Meanwhile, the fall festivals have started announcing their slates, giving us a clearer picture of how studios plan to position their potential contenders. This includes Netflix acquiring Ink, which I had removed from the board in my previous update due to misinformation that it had been pushed to next year. Instead, Netflix is taking it aggressively through the festival circuit. We’ve also seen some curious decisions not to screen certain titles, such as Digger or The Social Reckoning, or at least, as of this writing, neither is on a festival slate.

Focus Features may have made the biggest acquisition of all when it picked up the much-buzzed-about Elsinore, which I now believe has replaced Sense And Sensibility as its top priority, with Obsession still lingering as a very real possibility.

A24 appears to have an embarrassment of riches compared to last year. The Invite has been met with raves from audiences, but the studio still has major commercial plays in Tony and Primetime, along with festival hopefuls The Debut, Club Kid, and Misty Green.

Searchlight Pictures, which failed to land a Best Picture nominee last year, is hoping that both Wild Horse Nine and Behemoth!, each taking a different festival path, can break into the lineup.

Neon has Fjord as its top contender, with All Of A Sudden also looking like a legitimate possibility. Beyond those, the studio has potential dark horses in Artificial, A Place in Hell, and Paper Tiger, the latter of which was selected to open NYFF.

Meanwhile, defending champion Warner Brothers is opting to skip the festival circuit altogether, instead relying on trailer events to sell its two contenders, Digger and Dune: Part Three.

My outlook on the race in a post-The Odyssey premiere, post-festival-slate-announcement world can be found below. The board has now shrunk to 40 slots spread across four tiers. With the fall festivals right around the corner and the rankings already shifting, the question for me is simple, will a shiny new toy emerge late next month, or did our eventual Best Picture winner premiere and cement itself this past weekend?