Just like a bad sports movie, the year of movies can be so predictable. The first four or so months are almost always dead, with a few surprises thrown in, followed by a summer of high-budgeted blockbusters, which happen to be more and more sequels and comic book stories over the past couple years, and wrapping up with a period, lasting usually from September to December and coinciding with the fall semester of school that’s chock full of Oscar bait with studios pushing star-studded dramas and foreign language films down everyone’s throat.
This year is no different.
The month is now April and the year is writing itself just like it always does. The Bank Job, Be Kind Rewind, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall have premiered to good reviews while everything else is not worth writing about. And what’s around the corner?
Sequels, high budgets, and comic book adaptations.
Iron Man. Speed Racer. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Get Smart, Wall-E, Wanted, Hancock, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, The Dark Knight. Step Brothers. Tropic Thunder. The Incredible Hulk.
Four are sequels. Six were previously comics. Almost all of them cost over $100 million.
What follows is a slim yet modest list of lower budget movies that practically no one will see, like last year’s Best Picture nominees (Only Juno made money essentially) yet everyone in the Academy will praise, like Burn After Reading, Revolution Road, Body of Lies, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The International, Australia, and The Reader.
Of course there are couple of oddities in the schedule, with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Max Payne appearing later in the year then they should, but again the film lovers are presented with yet another cliched schedule of movies.
Does it make sense? Financially it does for studios to put their most costly films in a period where movies historically make money and for the viewers it also makes sense to have the most movies in the time when a large segment of the audience (Namely those in school) will have a chance to see them all.
That still doesn’t make it any less boring. I hope in the future more and more studios will try and get their heavy hitters out earlier, like in January and February so that the film fans have something to see early, and get some more out later, so more popular flicks make into Oscar talk.
3 Comments
I’d love to see more Oscar-worthy movies come out earlier in the year as well. I think the problem is that when good movies do come out at that time, they get completely overlooked come Oscar season. The Lookout comes to mind, although I’m sure I could come up with a lot more if I thought about it. Even movies that everyone raves about at the beginning of Oscar season tend to get overlooked for the major awards. 3:10 to Yuma would be an example of that happening last year.
The studios are just aware that it’s best to release the films they know are good at the end of the year, as they’ll have the best chance of winning something that way. It’s a stupid, monotonous system, though, and I can’t wait for the day when we’ll look back on it as just another wrinkle in cinema history.
I think that if more high-caliber movies were released earlier in the year, the Academy would stop neglecting this time of the year for consideration. Imagine The Departed in March. That kind of movie with that cast and director would have to get recognition, even if it were that early in the year.
As someone who in the eyes of most enthusiasts would be considered an average consumer, I think the formula works. I can honestly say that during the dead periods I don’t even think about going to the movies, it is around these times that I am focusing on school or a job or the monotone drull of life. Outside of the few exceptions, the summer is the most exciting time for me. I have four movies this month alone that I plan on seeing; ironman, s.o.r., indiana, and speed racer. It is a great time, I am out of school, have nothing better to do, its like christmas. You eagerly wait on the three month holiday of movies when you know there are going to be ones that you will love to see. I prefer this over say a big release coming out in mid february and I know I have a paper due and classes and work and all that jazz, but I really want to see the movie, yet my soul has already been snatched from my body by the evil spirits of the real world. All I am saying is that having the big dogs come out to play in the summer makes the summer worth being called a vacation time. sorry for run on sentences, i abandoned grammer midways through this.