Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award

The Toronto International Film Festival Grolsch People's Choice Award is an annual film award, presented by the Toronto International Film Festival to the film rated as the year's most popular film with festival audiences. The award's current corporate sponsor is Grolsch; past sponsors of the award have included Cadillac.

The winner of this award has often later earned Academy Award nominations, to the point that the award is now considered to be effectively the "starting gun" of the Academy Award nomination race.

At each film screening, attendees are invited to "vote" for the film by leaving their ticket stubs in voting boxes outside the theatre after the show. However, to ensure that the voting process does not bias the award toward films that screened in larger theatres and that a film's own cast and crew cannot stuff the ballot box at the premiere, the overall number of votes received is also weighted against the percentage of the screening audience that the total number of votes represented. For example, a film which screened in a smaller theatre, but had a highly passionate fan base who voted for the film en masse, can have an advantage over a film that had a larger number of raw votes representing a smaller percentage of the overall viewers. Because each film is screened multiple times over the course of the entire festival, the process also enables the organizers to evaluate which films are generating more audience buzz, by virtue of a significant increase in attendance and/or People's Choice votes at the follow-up screenings.

After the awards are announced, the festival closes with a free public screening of the winning film at Roy Thomson Hall.

The table below shows the People's Choice winners of past years. Prior to 2000, only the overall winner was named each year; in that year, the festival began announcing the first and second runners-up for the award as well.

The table notes whether films have been winners or nominees for the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film or Best Documentary Feature.

...
Wikipedia