Movies with the most Academy Awards wins of all time 2024

As of February 2024, three films tied for most Academy Award wins of all time. "Ben-Hur" (1959), "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (2003), and "Titanic" (1997) each received 11 Oscars. The musical with the most Oscar wins was "West Side Story" (1961), with ten trophies. Out of the winners displayed, "Cabaret" (1972) is the only title that lost in the Best Picture category – "The Godfather" won that trophy in 1973.

The studios will go on – or will they?

Only three of the seven production companies behind the top three Oscar-winning movies in history were among the Academy Award-winning studios in 2022: Warner Bros. (responsible for the label New Line Cinema), Disney (the current owner of 20th Century Studios), and MGM (today run by Amazon). Wins for the most influential prize in Hollywood reflected two major trends in the industry. On the one hand, the hegemony of Disney. On the other, the rise of streaming platforms such as Amazon and Netflix. In 2022, Netflix's Oscar nominations decreased for the first time. Still, its 27 nominations that year were the company's second-highest number ever.

The best of two worlds

The recipe for a so-called Oscar bait – that is, a movie seemingly produced for the sake of snatching the coveted trophy – may include the Academy's sweethearts. But that does not necessarily translate into a two-digit number of wins. None of the only six actors with at least three Oscar wins participated in the only four films with at least ten Oscar wins. These two elite groups tend to follow different tropes. The most rewarded actors usually received trophies for their work in character-based movies. Meanwhile, the most rewarded films typically received prizes for their epic, larger-than-life narratives and sets.