YMMV / The Lion in Winter

• Award Snub:
  • One of the many moments Peter O'Toole lost the Best Actor Academy Award and perhaps the most egregious case of this too, being generally pointed to as the film where O'Toole should've won his Oscar. Whereas other years had him losing to performances that would go on to be quite iconic, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, and Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, this had him losing to Cliff Robertson in the lesser-known Charly. While a great actor, Robertson made for a shocking winner, given the lack of love for his film, the fact that his performance received mixed reviews from critics and audiences (it's agreed that Robertson's win was based more on promotion than performance), and that O'Toole managed to win the Golden Globe beforehand.
  • The film itself lost out on the Best Picture award to Oliver!, which was yet another of the big, plush musical adaptations that Academy voters were obsessed with in The '60s.
• Awesome Music: The use of Gregorian chanting is very well done here. As is the Orchestral Bombing. John Barry's Academy Award for Best Original Score was well-earned.
• Friendly Fandoms: Many fans of The Lion in Winter are also fans of Succession, thanks to lots of overlapping themes—Succession Crisis, Dysfunctional Family, toxic love, the way power corrupts, the nature of legacy, etc. Both stories' extremely sharp writing and dark senses of humor also help. The Lion in Winter has been not-inaccurately pitched to newcomers as "Succession, but it came out first, it's historical, and follows actual royalty."
• Happily Ever Before: The movie's ending, with Henry facing the future with renewed vitality, becomes somewhat bittersweet when you read what happened to his historical counterpart on The Other Wiki.
• Hollywood Homely: Several characters make pointed remarks to Eleanor about how she's no longer as beautiful as she once was, despite Katharine Hepburn still looking quite good for her age. This could also have all simply been pettiness toward Eleanor.
  Alais: How is your queen?
  Henry: Decaying, I suppose.
• Ho Yay:
  • Philip and Richard have a thing going on.
  • In the remake, Philip and Geoffrey as well. This is Truth in Television: historians have gotten to thinking that it was Geoff who was in bed — literally and figuratively — with Philip.
• Jerkass Woobie: All the characters, really.
• Mind Game Ship: Henry/Eleanor, a canonical example, with quite a bit of real life basis, too! The entire plot is essentially them trying to scheme against each other and twist the knife in each other as much as possible, but it's also clear their love hasn't fully died, making for a very messed-up relationship. You know a marriage is bad when the husband literally imprisoning the wife isn't even the worst aspect of it. But, of course, said wife can dish out the abuse as well as she can take it.
• Retroactive Recognition: Timothy Dalton makes his film debut as Philip of France. And a very young Anthony Hopkins appears as Richard the Lionheart.
• The Woobie: Poor, poor Alais. She's dreading being married to Richard since she knows they'd be a miserable couple; her own brother only seems to regard her as a means to score points off Henry; while Henry himself does appear to genuinely love her, he's also perfectly willing to put her through the emotional wringer in order to achieve his goals; and because she's Henry's mistress she's now at odds with Eleanor, the only mother figure she's ever known.
  Alais: I don't know who's to be congratulated! Kings, queens, knights, everywhere you look, and I'm the only pawn! I haven't got a thing to lose! That makes me dangerous!

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