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With Sean Baker’s Anora winning in five categories and leading the 97th Oscars, people are flocking to watch the underrated and perhaps overlooked film and wondering if they may have missed anything else in the director’s arthouse filmography.
Anora premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in early 2024, and won the Palme d’Or (the highest prize at Cannes) as well as the acclaim of all viewers and critics. The way everyone gushed about Baker’s new comedy-drama, with the film receiving a 10-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening, made it clear that the Mikey Madison-led flick would be a serious contender in the Academy Awards.
Flash forward to February 2025 and the 97th Oscars, where Anora managed to lead the ceremony by winning in the five major categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay (also given to Baker), and Best Actress, which went to Madison.
The film has also turned a major profit given its inconsequential budget, once again proving that you don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a single project to justify the industry’s scale or to keep the wheels turning. But what does that say about the personal success of Anora‘s director Sean Baker, who has dedicated his entire career to small, profound projects like this?
What is Sean Baker’s net worth?
Baker made his experimental directorial debut in 2000 with the movie Four Letter Words, starring a cast of unknowns with no specified budget. He then went on to co-create Greg the Bunny for television, and continued to experiment with independent filmmaking through 2004’s Take Out (co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou), 2008’s Prince of Broadway, and 2012’s Starlet, which starred Dree Hemingway and was produced on a reported budget of $235,000.
Baker’s breakthrough came in 2015 through Tangerine, a film shot with three iPhone 5s and applauded for the director’s exceptional techniques in making a low-budget movie work. Tangerine had a budget of $100,000, and went on to gross $935,900 at the box office. But apart from the brilliant directing chops, it was the story of Sin-Dee Rella, a transgender sex worker who gets cheated on, that roped in much acclaim for Baker, and paved the path for 2017’s The Florida Project, a highly acclaimed feature film starring Willem Dafoe that received nods at the Golden Globes, the Oscars, the SAGs, and the BAFTAs. The film turned out to be Baker’s most commercially successful project to date, earning $11.3 million against a budget of $2 million.
While these may not seem much in their own right, factoring in Anora changes the equation considerably; a movie that was made on a budget of $6 million but went on to gross $41 million at the box office.
It’s unclear how much Baker has made off of all these movies in his filmography, but estimates put his net worth somewhere between $5 to $10 million. This may not seem like much at a glance, but winning five Oscars in the same night will certainly push Baker into the big boys’ league of Hollywood, and we can’t wait to see what the man will come up with next, especially given his unique narrative style, and his focus on marginalized communities.