Oscar Seasoning: Are We Done With Biopics in 2025?

We’re midway through November, and the majority of this year’s awards season contenders have already premiered. There are one or two whose fates remain unknown (Wicked: For Good, the new Avatar movie), but the lion’s share of players have their reviews secured and the hype to match. While browsing through the many predictions lists, I found myself wondering something I never would have expected only a few weeks ago: will we get a biopic-free Best Picture line-up?

So, quick answer: No. Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s loopy take on the true story of a ping pong player, has rave reviews and will probably make the final ten, and help to cement Timothee Chalamet as a Best Actor nominee. But that’s not a traditional biopic, especially compared to the one that Josh’s brother Benny made. The reason I asked the questions is because the longlists of possible BP nominees are surprisingly bereft of biopics we were all expecting to be sure-fire things: The Smashing Machine, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Christy, and Nuremberg. Instead, critics are expecting a slew of fascinating original movies to take the spotlight: Sinners, Sentimental Value, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Bugonia, Hamnet, Train Dreams, Frankenstein, It Was Just An Accident…

As a certified biopic sceptic, I am obviously thrilled with this news. How amazing would it be if the Best Director line-up was made up of people like Chloe Zhao, Ryan Coogler, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Jafar Panahi? Imagine Best Actor having Michael B. Jordan as a frontrunner, or an adapted screenplay shortlist based on novels by Mary Shelley and Denis Johnson? It’s early days, granted, and I’ve learned to never be optimistic about awards season. My goal every year is to end it with a shrug of, “huh, well, that could have been a whole lot worse.” I remember the bad years, guys.

(Image via A24.)

So, a 2025 where staid and incurious biopics designed solely for “For Your Consideration” ads is exciting to me. Think about what we started the year with. Everyone, myself included, was waiting for The Smashing Machine rollout and Dwayne Johnson’s evolution into Serious Actor. I was prepared for it to be the most omnipresent campaign of the season, and now, it’s all but disappeared after a slew of good-not-great reviews and a box office non-starter. A24 gave up on it almost immediately. Now, they’re trying to sell it as the underdog of the season, which is admittedly very funny.

The same goes for the Springsteen biopic, starring Jeremy Allen White. Music biopics are now as commodified a genre as the superhero movie. The biopic is not a formula that necessarily encourages experimentation, but this recent spate of by-the-numbers brand expansion exercises make Walk the Line look like Wavelength (for the record, Walk the Line is great but gets dinged a lot because of Walk Hard, and frankly, more movies should have leads with retina-scorching chemistry as good as that of Phoenix and Witherspoon. I hope all of the rumours about that production are true.)

I blame Bohemian Rhapsody for this (and most things in life, to be honest.) For a while, it felt like an indomitable money-printing machine. But audiences didn’t care about Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, and neither did critics. They’ll pay thousands to see The Boss in concert, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be enthused about a rote biographical trek of the time he made Nebraska. It’s a film that couldn’t make White’s solid impersonation sing, so to speak. Frankly, there wasn’t really a story here. Bruce is a nice guy who had some dark times but made it into art, and there wasn’t much else to say.

With Christy, the discourse has been more centred on its star, Sydney Sweeney, and whether or not her MAGA-ness and good jeans were responsible for its massive flopping. That’s no hyperbole. The biopic of boxing pioneer Christy Martin is, according to Box Office Mojo, one of the worst wide openings in North American box office history. That’s almost impressive. Audiences chose to see Tron: Ares in its fifth week of release more than Christy. As fun as it would be to point to Sweeney’s garbage politics and her smarmy unrepentance over it as the reason this film is dying, I think the real answer is much simpler. It’s not a great movie, neither good enough to be a critical darling or appealing enough for commercial purposes. The Oscars do love a boxing/fighting movie, but if The Smashing Machine, which at least won Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, can’t entice them, why would this?

(Image via Black Bear.)

When Nuremberg premiered at TIFF, a critic friend of mine at the fest joked that the movie fell out of a time loop from the Oscar season of 1996. It really did feel like a throwback to an earlier era of awards speculation. If it were made 30 years ago, it’d star Al Pacino and Tom Cruise, and it’d probably make $100 million. I don’t think we’re entirely moving away from this kind of middle-of-the-road “prestige” historical drama. What is Conclave if not the fictional version of that, but with jokes? Still, every time I saw an ad for Nuremberg or read a review straining to emphasize its relevance to the issues of today, I groaned. I imagine that was a common occurrence given its low box office grosses. If you’re going to make a film like this in 2025, then you need impeccable craft and a sharp perspective to make it work. The Zone of Interest, this movie ain’t.

These biopics are largely bound together by their sameness. Some tried to deviate from the biopic genre tropes but remained constricted by them. A couple of them don’t even feel substantive enough in terms of narrative or real-life drama to sustain a sturdy arc. Really, though, you knew what all of these films were going to be like from the moment they were announced. Is that what put off audiences? It doesn’t help that theatrical releases are struggling overall as studios scramble to get butts into seats and keep coming up short. It’s expensive to go to the cinema and there are plenty of at-home options to focus on instead. Why waste the cash on what everyone knows will be a middling experience when you can binge-watch The Big C (no, seriously, how is this apparently one of the most-watched things on Netflix right now?)

The biopic will never die as an awards favourite. It’s too reliable a formula and the industry loves congratulating itself with this kind of homework. They love the labour of recreating a famous person’s entire shtick and throwing Oscars at it. It almost doesn’t matter if the performance is good or has any real life to it. But that kind of “well, you worked hard” acting can’t help but feel pale in a year where we have the likes of Jessie Buckley, Wagner Moura, Leonardo DiCaprio, Amy Madigan, Michael B. Jordan, Ethan Hawke, Teyana Taylor, Stellan and Alexander Skarsgard, Renate Reinsve, Amanda Seyfried, Jesse Plemons, Lee Byung-hun, and Rose Byrne are giving some of the best work of their careers. We are not short of incredible options in 2025. Even the Academy, which is perennially allergic to taking risks, has no excuse to play it safe.

But there are biopics in competition. I mentioned Marty Supreme, starring Timothee Chalamet, the Academy’s favourite young millennial man. Reviews have been great and Mr. Kylie seems likely to get into Best Actor. Still, that’s not a “conventional” biopic, and it’s also not about someone who is instantly recognisable to the masses. I tend to prefer it when the genre focuses on those who aren’t icons. Look at Can You Ever Forgive Me for an excellent example of why.

(Image via A24.)

There’s also Song Sung Blue, a musical biopic about, I’m not kidding, a Neil Diamond tribute act. Kate Hudson’s team has been working overtime to sell her as a Best Actress candidate. Reviews are surprisingly good, and Hudson has a meaty role, but hoo boy this one could be messy. To quote my friend Kristen Lopez’s review, “Pundits have called Hudson an Oscars frontrunner this year and I can only surmise it’s because she’s doing a standard “stunning and brave” portrayal of both a disabled person and a woman over a size 3 who isn’t wearing makeup.” Lopez’s review goes into the ways the film uses all of the trite disability tropes for an “inspirational” baity movie. Sounds nightmarish and out-of-date, so of course I’m scared the Academy will adore it. Emilia Perez only just happened, guys!

Me writing this piece, of course, means I’ve probably jinxed things and Song Sung Blue will sweep the ceremony. My apologies in advance. I do, however, think it’s overall a good thing that the wannabes fell so quickly because they thought sitting on the fence of genre and ambition would guarantee them a place in the Academy’s thoughts. Maybe we can get some more experimental biopics or ones not slavishly concerned with selling soundtracks? Eh, those four Beatles movies are gonna make billions, aren’t they?