‘No Other Land’ Doesn’t Have a U.S. Distributor, but Is Still the Year’s Highest-Grossing Oscar-Nominated Documentary
“No Other Land” is the most acclaimed film of 2024 without U.S. distribution, be it because of apprehension over embracing a story about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or because of general concern for the documentary market theatrically.
And yet, even without a proper distributor backing it, the film has grossed just shy of $420,000 at the domestic box office. What’s more impressive — or perhaps more sad, considering the state of documentary film — is that the film is now the highest-grossing feature among the five doc features nominated at the Oscars this year.
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According to data from Comscore, “Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat” (Kino Lorber) is the next highest with $320,530 cumulative as of February 25. “Porcelain War” (Picturehouse Films) came in at No. 3 with $215,826 cumulative, and No. 4 “Sugarcane” (Variance Films) has $112,251 cumulative. “Black Box Diaries” (MTV Documentary Films) had no reported numbers via Comscore but had a release on October 25, and Box Office Mojo lists a worldwide gross of $33,228.
“No Other Land” first started playing theaters on January 31 and opened at New York City’s Film Forum to roughly $26,000 in its first week, with Film Forum offering the release just one week after Oscar nominations came out. This past weekend, “No Other Land” doubled its screen count to 54 screens and posted a per-screen average of $1,780.
And that rise won’t stop after the Oscars, as this coming weekend it stands to expand again to 83 screens.
After first winning the Berlinale Documentary Award and the Audience Award at Berlin now over a year ago, “No Other Land” has sat without distribution from U.S. buyers, but an individual with knowledge of the film’s release strategy told IndieWire the filmmakers collectively teamed with independent distribution consultant Michael Tuckman to help plan its release. Since then, its platform release has been fairly traditional, targeting the coasts and typical indie arthouses before expanding wider to other major cities.
It would not be the first recent film to find success as an independent release. In fact, another film on the Oscars shortlist, the political doc “Union,” also went without proper distribution and managed to earn approximately $10,000 at the box office, according to Comscore data.
But the doc market theatrically in 2024 was in as dire a spot as ever. The top release of last year was “Am I Racist?,” the satirical doc from conservative pundit Matt Walsh as released by The Daily Wire, pulling in $12.3 million cumulative according to Comscore. The animated Pharrell doc “Piece by Piece” came close with roughly $10 million globally, and the recent release of “Becoming Led Zeppelin” is the only documentary so far this year with a chance to catch it.
“As a genre, the documentary film has historically had mixed results at the box office,” Comscore senior analyst Paul Dergarabedian told IndieWire. “This may be due in part to the virtually unlimited supply of some truly excellent long-form multi-episode documentary series that are available on every streaming platform known to man, and thus the theatrically released films often struggle to find a broad audience enough to generate substantial box office.”
But the success of films like “No Other Land” and “Eno” (also from last year) are proving that, maybe there is an audience for documentaries in theaters after all.
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