10 Things Everybody Gets Wrong About 2014 Movies

9. American Sniper Was Only A 2014 Release On A Technicality

American Sniper has just opened to real box office success, in one week making more than any of the other Best Picture nominees across their respective runs. That its opening weekend has created so many reams of print should make it pretty hard to ignore that it's a new, and therefore 2015, movie. Yet head to any official movie site and it's classed as a 2014 release. Did people just ignore the film until the Oscar noms came out? Like Her for 2013, American Sniper had a minor release in the previous year just to ensure it could be included in the year's Oscar race. The Academy's rules for shortlisting only require a movie to have shown for a week in one cinema in LA, so in the very end of 2014 American Sniper did just that - it had "limited" release on 25th December. It's one of the mildly irritating elements of the awards race that reveals the whole thing as a politically motivated exercise. Still, as a marketing stunt it works - American Sniper is a major awards contender (it won't win any, but it still ran) and thanks to that a flag-waving COD Let's Play became something all manner of cinemagoers felt they had to see. All thanks to abusing a Hollywood loophole.