If you have followed along with me on the Oscar Viewing Project for many years (I promise, I am working my ass off to get another ballot up, but my European trip and having a cold for the entire week after have largely made me a vegetable the past week...prayers going up that I will have more time to work on my To Do list this week as it keeps getting longer), you will know that I am obsessed with the Visual Effects category. Perhaps more than any other Oscar race, it's the one I think is the most intriguing, mostly because it is so dependent on the films in the race, and because it's the one race where you can predict the nominees relatively early. People love to proclaim awards races "over" in October for acting races especially, and then they are insanely wrong at the end of the day (I don't understand the lack of first-hand embarrassment as a result of that, but to each their own in 2025, I guess...in a world where people use AI to send text messages, maybe no one is capable of shame anymore?), but Visual Effects films fit a certain type, and they are easier to see coming (any film that is going to be a contender for the nomination is, at this point, already advertising with movie trailers). So I like to, each October, get down for posterity who I think will make the shortlist, the list of ten films that are contenders for the final five nominations. Last year I did really well given how early it was, correctly getting all five of the eventual Oscar nominees on the list, plus three shortlisted contenders, with the only ones I missed being Civil War (which I didn't predict at all, and honestly don't feel too bad about) and Mufasa (which I nearly added to the list) in favor of the totally unloved Mad Max sequel Furiosa and the strange Robert Zemeckis family film Here. I will say right up front that by doing this in October, I'm not going to get them all right, but it's more fun when we're still in the speculation phase and not just guessing the same things everyone else is guessing. We'll talk through some of the nuances of this process, and how predicting the shortlist oftentimes differs from predicting the actual winners, but let's get into this, starting with the "sure things."
Saying "sure thing" about an Oscar nomination in October is usually tempting fate, but there are certain movies that you just can't ignore in a VFX race, and we have two of them this year. This is less than I normally do, and you're going to hear this a few times in this article, but 2025 is a uniquely hard time to predict this mostly because there weren't as many major special effects films this year, and those that did get made aren't all hits. You don't have to be a gigantic movie to be able to make the shortlist (last year, Civil War made the list with a $50 million budget, relatively low for this category), but it helps, and it also helps if you made a lot of money. No movie this year did both to the degree I feel it's "inevitable" that they make this list. So we're actually going to do something unprecedented with this article series-only pronounce two "not yet released" films for the shortlist.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is the sort of film that you can bet the farm on in this category. Even if the film sucks (and James Cameron's near flawless record as a visual filmmaker makes that feel unlikely), it's still the undisputed frontrunner for both the nominations and a win. You have to go back to 1984 to find a Cameron film that wasn't shortlisted (weirdly 1984's The Terminator), and so this is the free space in a Bingo card-it's in the Top 10.
The other film that I think feels locked into the shortlist is Wicked: For Good. I had mixed feelings on the first one, and in fact listed it fifth in my OVP for last year among the actual nominees. But Oscar and I have different tastes, and given the gargantuan box office, the likely elevated effects here (for those familiar with the musical, you know the back half has more potential for special effects), and its previous nomination, I think it's certain to be nominated (and therefore shortlisted). Other than those two, though, I don't think anyone can feel totally safe.
One of the bigger questions when it comes to predicting VFX nominations is whether or not the rest of the Academy is going to be into the movies. Best Picture contenders, even if they have only a few special effects, tend to get some love here. Sinners, for example, if it's in the Best Picture field, could make this list. One of the nuances of the Shortlist is that it frequently results in movies that have any sort of Best Picture heat getting on the list, even if they aren't nominated (recent Best Picture nominees Poor Things, Dunkirk, Black Panther, & The Shape of Water all got on the shortlists without getting actual nominations, for example).
There are also films that come from major Oscar-winning/nominated directors that might be a contender if they click in other categories. A few come to mind, including Kathryn Bigelow's political thriller A House of Dynamite, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, and Paul Greengrass's The Lost Bus. Frankenstein's mixed reviews at film festivals, combined with being a horror movie (weirdly, despite the genre being a pioneer in visual effects for decades, horror movies don't always click with this branch) feels the most likely of the bunch even with those deficits, but I will note that The Lost Bus is coming from Industrial Light & Magic, the most important visual effects house in Hollywood (which gets a majority of the shortlisted contenders virtually every year.
I also think that a big question mark is F1, which is a movie that might do very well in the tech categories (it's not going in for Best Picture, but Sound, Editing, Cinematography, & of course Visual Effects are all very real threats). Despite most major blockbusters these days being sequels or remakes, this category does have a penchant for original movies, and so I honestly think that F1 is going to have a solid shot here, especially given the surprisingly robust box office pull.
It's worth noting here that we are predicting the final shortlist nominees, not the Top 10 films that are most likely to get nominated, as there's a slight difference between the two, and a good example of that is Jurassic World: Rebirth. The Jurassic Park franchise has not been nominated for this category since 1997, indicating that the Academy has largely given up on it as an option, but every installment in the series has been on the shortlist, which means that it's honestly a decent guess to be another also-ran. I wouldn't have it in my Top 10 for getting a nomination (though it'd be close), but it is a really good guess for a shortlist citation.
That's the thing with the shortlist-it usually feels a bit more bloated, and definitely liking the "MOST" special effects contenders, so I wouldn't totally throw out things like the live-action remakes of Snow White, How to Train Your Dragon, and Lilo & Stitch. I also think that the surprise recent nomination for Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning in this category makes the final installment in the series a probable shortlister, particularly given that four of the previous movies in the series were on the shortlist. The Tron series has never been nominated, but given the impressive effects in Tron Ares' trailer (and that Tron Legacy got in the Top 10), I would also consider that a strong contender.
And then, of course, there are the superhero films. Since the release of Iron Man, while there have been years the MCU has missed for a nomination, there has never been a year where one of their films wasn't on the ten-wide shortlist, and given there are three contenders this year (Captain America 4, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps) I think at least one is included, likely the latter given its retro charms, though two isn't out of the question. Yes, two, don't give me that look even though the other two were noted misfires in terms of box office expectations. Of the 34 MCU films prior to 2025 (i.e. the ones that have gone through their Oscar year) 13 got nominated, and another 12 were shortlisted, so they like Marvel a lot (they also have never given them a statue, so they don't love MCU a lot, but that's not what we're guessing today).
DC, on the other hand, regularly misses; they have only gotten one actual nomination in the past 15 years in this category (2022's The Batman), and in terms of the shortlist, the only other citation they've gotten in the past ten years was 2020's Birds of Prey (a notoriously weak field). Superman checks a lot of boxes for Oscar (it's ILM, it's the rebrand of a franchise they've gone for before, and it made a lot of money), but it's not the sure thing that it would've been if, say, this was a Marvel movie.
Finishing things out, we have a few odds-and-ends. If Glen Powell in The Running Man is a surprise hit, it's not insane to think it could make it onto the list. Films like Sketch, Mickey 17, and Fountain of Youth are a bit too small to get into the conversation, but given they do a 20-wide field for this, it's not insane to think they might make the first round list (and if you make that list, you could always be the weird, "huh-how'd that happen"-style Civil War contender). A likelier Civil War contender could be Warfare, which uses a combination of traditional and computer-generated effects in its production, and was critically-acclaimed earlier this year. If there are fans in the Academy, it's not out of the question it could surprise.
But perhaps the most important "odds & ends" contender should be a movie that, as of right now, is the highest-grossing domestic movie of 2025 (though it's less than $1 million away from Lilo & Stitch, so that's a precarious perch): A Minecraft Movie. Minecraft is jam-packed with special effects, and I honestly do think that it will make the twenty-wide list. In a year of somewhat disappointing box office, it is absolutely a film that no one saw coming in terms of its success, and Oscar sometimes cares about what keeps his pockets lined. The effects are pretty much agreed to be bad, and it will likely suffer the fate of a different Jack Black franchise (his Jumanji films have never been on the ten-wide shortlist despite multiple mentions on the 20-wide list), but to skip talking about it would be insane-it's definitely a part of the conversation for the shortlist, even if a nomination feels too silly to ponder.
My Final Shortlist Predictions (Alphabetical)
With all of that being said, here are my predictions as of right now of who will be the Visual Effects Shortlist in 2025:
- Avatar: Fire and Ash
- F1
- The Fantastic Four: The First Steps
- Jurassic World: Rebirth
- The Lost Bus
- Mission Impossible Final Reckoning
- Superman
- Thunderbolts
- Tron: Ares
- Wicked: For Good
I will confess that this feels a little bit vanilla. I skipped Frankenstein because most people who have seen it seem to be skipping it (and I have been burned a lot by horror movies here, which is also why I'm swiping left on Sinners). How to Train Your Dragon surely makes the most sense here, and probably should get the spot I gave to Thunderbolts, but the MCU is such a consistent bet for the shortlist, and honestly you have to have at least a couple listed that have no shot at an actual nomination as that's shortlist tradition. Part of me wants to list Warfare and Minecraft, the former because it has such specific Civil War vibes (an early year critical darling that Oscar tries to make room for) and the latter because it made so much money, but I can't really justify skipping any of these, and if I did (looking at you Thunderbolts, The Lost Bus, and Jurassic World), I'd probably put in the flying dragons...even if they'll get their fair share of that in Avatar. So these are my ten.
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