2025 Oscars: Best Editing Predictions

Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2, and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT. We update our picks throughout awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.

The State of the Race

Fall has arrived, and “Conclave” (Focus Features), “Emilia Pérez” (Netflix), “The Brutalist” (A24), “Gladiator II” (Paramount), and “Wicked” (Universal) have all emerged as Best Editing Oscar contenders. However, “Blitz” (Apple TV+), “Nickel Boys” (Amazon MGM Studios), “Queer” (A24), and “The First Inside” (Amazon MGM Studios) look promising, and “September 5” (Paramount) is shaping up to be the dark horse. Still to be seen are “Nosferatu” (Focus Features) and “A Complete Unknown” (Searchlight Pictures), but don’t forget about “Dune: Part Two” (Warner Bros.).

“Conclave,” Edward Berger’s follow-up to “All Quiet on the Western Front,” is a psychological thriller in which Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal searches for a successor to the deceased Pope, who harbored a dark secret. Editor Nick Emerson handles the slow burn of all the claustrophobic machinations of selecting a Pope in a sequestered enclave in the Vatican, moving the mystery along in the confined setting, with the added drama concerning a crisis of faith for Fiennes.

“Gladiator II,” Ridley Scott’s sequel to his Oscar winner, takes place two decades later as the Roman Empire continues to implode. Cut by go-to editors Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo, the sequel concerns Lucius (Paul Mescal), the former heir to the Empire, forced to enter the Colosseum as a ruthless gladiator. Denzel Washington’s Macrinus uses Lucius as part of his power play against the mad twin emperors, Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn), by pitting him in the arena against Pedro Pascal’s Roman general, Marcus Acacius. The editors deftly balance the action-packed spectacle in the Colosseum (which includes fighting baboons and naval combat in water and stocked with sharks) with the Lucius revenge story and Macrinus’ political maneuvers.

“Emilia Pérez,” the musical crime thriller from Jacques Audiard, stars Zoe Saldaña as a disgruntled lawyer who assists the titular Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) in undergoing gender confirmation surgery. The director audaciously offers an operatic fever dream about the hope of a new life through song and dance — but it’s also about the difficulty in leading double lives. Go-to editor Juliette Welfling finds the proper operatic rhythm and pacing to accommodate the different stylistic mixtures.

In “Wicked,” Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, we get the unlikely friendship between Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), a compassionate girl with green skin, and the conceited Galinda (Ariana Grande), who eventually become the Wicked Witch and Glinda the Good. Chu’s go-to editor, Myron Kerstein, got a crash course in VFX-heavy movies to prepare for the workflow. The movie offers musical spectacle that leans into magical realism as well as the intimate drama between the two leads, which primarily takes place at Shiz University before a meeting with The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) in Emerald City.

In “Dune: Part Two,” Oscar-winning editor Joe Walker (“Dune”) had a lot more action to deal with in expanding Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic. It became a high-octane “Lawrence of Arabia” in space: a love story and political adventure in which Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) would-be messiah leads the nomadic Fremen in battle on Arrakis, which leads to a holy war. Indeed, the battles demanded a faster pace, more compression of time, and less exposition. Cutting “Part Two” was almost like riding the sandworm into the heat of battle as a desert guerilla fighter. Walker told IndieWire that it was “bignormous.”

“The Brutalist,” from director Brady Corbet (“Vox Lux”), is a 215-minute epic shot in VistaVision, spanning 30 years in the life of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew and Auschwitz survivor who struggles as a visionary architect before being offered a massive project by industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). The Brutalist architectural movement from the ’50s came out of post-war trauma and serves as the driving force in the conflict between the two. Hungarian editor Dávid Jancsó was not only adept at handling the complex narrative demands but was also familiar with the challenges of shooting in VistaVision (the first time since “One Eyed Jacks”), in which the 35mm film is mounted horizontally for higher resolution.

“September 5,” director Tim Fehlbaum’s (“Hell”) docudrama about ABC Sports’ groundbreaking broadcast of the Israeli terrorist attack during the 1972 Munich Olympics, recalls “All the President’s Men” as a suspenseful, journalistic procedural. Go-to editor Hansjörg Weißbrich handles the fast-paced narrative, which pings back and forth between the four principal characters: Peter Sarsgaard as cunning producer Roone Arledge, John Magaro as newbie coordinating producer Geoffrey Mason, Ben Chaplin as VP of Olympic Operations Marvin Bader, and Leonie Benesch as the German assistant Marianne Gebhardt caught in the crossfire. The editor seamlessly alternates between the ABC archival footage of Jim McKay’s broadcast on the monitors and the dramatic recreation.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” explores the harrowing German aerial assault on London during World War II as a social realist fable. Editor Peter Sciberras deftly balances the communal and personal stories, in which the use of song permeates the film as a show of strength and coping device. It focuses on biracial youngster George (Elliott Heffernan), who’s hurled on an incredible “Oliver Twist”-like adventure while perilously heading back home to his munitions worker mom (Saoirse Ronan) and musical grandfather (Paul Weller).

“Nosferatu,” director Robert Eggers’ reworking of the legendary silent film, stars Bill Skarsgård as vampire Count Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, and Nicholas Hoult as her husband, Thomas Hutter. Editor Louise Ford (“The Northman”) handles the chills and thrills of roving from 19th-century Germany to a Gothic castle in Romania, where the couple is haunted by dreams that could be harbingers of what’s to come, and peek-a-boo with the elusive vampire, lurking in the shadows.

“Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, explores two Black teenagers, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who become friends as wards of a barbaric juvenile reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida. The film is a sensory experience about their different POVs — hope and despair— with lots of abstract imagery. Editor Nicholas Monsour (“Nope”) creates a rhythm and pace that are distinctive for Elwood and Turner and become hyper-subjective and immersive for the audience. The intent is to pull us into a world that contrasts brutality with the beauty of the everyday mundane.

With “Challengers,” director Luca Guadagnino tackles the competitive nature of tennis as a love triangle involving former tennis prodigy-turned-coach Zendaya, her husband and slumping tennis champ Mike Faist, and low-circuit tennis player Josh O’Connor, who is her ex-lover and his former best friend. Editor Marco Costa juxtaposes the relationships and rivalries in non-linear fashion across 13 years, with the matches reflecting their changing emotional and personal dynamics. The editing is built on geometries and shapes, inspired by the image of the triangle. He created symmetries and complementary movements, imagining the tennis court net as a mirror in which the characters reflect themselves. He also deconstructed time using numerous slow-motion shots, which are broken and fractured by hyperkinetic energy and accelerations and slowdowns, just like the pacing of tennis matches.

“Queer,” Guadagnino’s much-anticipated adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella about disconnected gay American expatriates in post-World War II Mexico City, finds heroin user William Lee (Daniel Craig) falling for the much younger and enigmatic Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) on an odyssey filled with psychedelic surrealism and great tenderness that ultimately takes them to the Ecuadorian jungle. Editor Costa definitely has many layers to explore here.

“The Fire Inside,” the directorial debut of cinematographer Rachel Morrison, is a coming-of-age biopic about young boxing phenom Clarissa “T-Rex” Shields (Ryan Destiny) training for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Editor Harry Yoon took great pains to collapse or expand time as needed, with considerations centered around how much of her childhood should be included or did they need to add another round to the Olympic gold medal watch to increase dramatic tension. The major challenge was cutting a sports movie where the climactic match happens at the end of the second act, so we had to make sure they didn’t lose narrative drive or interest.

“Saturday Night” (Sony Pictures), Jason Reitman’s behind-the-scenes re-enactment of how NBC’s revolutionary late-night sketch comedy show made its live debut on October 11, 1975, provided editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reed with a new kind of experimental freedom. By following anxious producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he guides his cast and crew through rehearsals, they essentially make audiences into a fly on the wall during the make or break 90-minute lead up to showtime. Making it all the more interesting, of course, is that the soon-to-be-legendary, “Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” consists of Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt).

“A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet and edited by Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris, chronicles the folk star’s rise in New York’s West Village in 1961 to the controversial 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he turned electric.

Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.

Frontrunners

“Conclave”
“Dune: Part Two”
“Emilia Pérez”
“Gladiator II”
“Wicked”

Contenders

“Blitz”
“The Brutalist”
“Challengers”
“A Complete Unknown”
“The Fire Inside”
“Nickel Boys”
“Nosferatu”
“Queer”
“Saturday Night”
“September 5”