Dump months

The dump months are what the film community has, before the era of streaming television, called the two periods of the year when there have been lowered commercial and critical expectations for most new theatrical releases from American filmmakers and distributors.

The weather and competition from other forms of mass entertainment, especially professional sports, also play a part; the winter dump months are further affected by the Academy Awards eligibility rules.

Notable examples of these for films released in January and February include The Silence of the Lambs, a well-reviewed box office smash that went on to win the 1991 Academy Award for Best Picture, and Get Out in 2017.

[3][4][5][6] "The big studios would never in a million years use this phrase", Dade Hayes, coauthor of Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became A National Obsession, told Newsday in August 2017.

Spending is low to begin with since many consumers are cutting back and repaying debts incurred during the preceding holiday season,[a] as well as having less free time,[10] Jeremy Kirk of Firstshowing.net, when asked to explain the dearth of good films in January, notes that moviegoers are returning to their work and school routines during the month.

[11] To be eligible for award consideration, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences requires that a film be shown in a theater in Los Angeles County, California, for at least seven consecutive days during which it is advertised in print media.

[23] Industry analysts feared that the storm could seriously impact the box office prospects of two films opening that weekend, Identity Thief and Side Effects,[23] both of which were seen as having potential to do better than most winter movies.

[22] The clearest sign of the storm's effect, according to Box Office Mojo, was the 35 percent drop in earnings for Silver Linings Playbook, then in wide release after several Oscar nominations.

[28][29] In 2018, the superhero film Black Panther set a new record for that holiday weekend with $235 million[30] In addition to the consistent popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, the critical praise and the holiday weekend, Marvel Studios took advantage of the fact that despite the month's supposed poor reputation for audience interest, as well as February's designation as Black History Month, a cultural event that made it an ideal time to release a film with such obvious African themes.

[39] "The prevailing wisdom is that people don't go to the movies in August" due to family vacations (on which Americans spend almost $2,000 a year, on average[40]), summer camp, among other factors, Vulture complained as it pondered another potentially dreary month in 2008.

[12] While an August release can open as successfully as a film earlier in the summer, "[i]t just doesn't have the ability to run five or six weeks so there's a scramble for June and July," Ted Mundorff, head of Landmark Theatres, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2014.

In 1987, Fatal Attraction, which opened in wide release on September 18[e] succeeded at the box office, staying in theaters through June of the next year[53] and also garnered six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

[69] According to Burr, from the earliest days of the studio system major releases had largely followed the same calendar modern audiences would recognize, clustered during spring, summer, and the end-of-year holidays.

"Silent-era Charlie Chaplin hits like The Kid (1921) and The Circus (1928), the Garbo/John Gilbert melodrama Flesh and the Devil (1927) and Josef von Sternberg's Last Command (1928) all came out during the first month of the year.

[2] A few months after Treasure's release, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., holding that it was a violation of antitrust law for the studios to own theater chains as well.

[70] Burr found that after it, with movies having less of a guaranteed box office since an adequate theatrical run was no longer a certainty, "release patterns began to clump more formally around big weekends, warmer weather and national holidays.

[75] But as the 2020 winter dump months were ending, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world, and many exhibitors were forced to close, either by law or lack of demand, as patrons limited their activities outside of their homes to control the disease's spread.

Sony / Columbia, for whom Bad Boys for Life had worked out so well, had scheduled Kraven the Hunter and Harold and the Purple Crayon, two major projects, for January 2023 releases (although both films would later be delayed to October 2023 and June 2023 respectively).

[79] Industry insiders do not disagree with this assessment; in 2013, Viacom's then-chief executive officer, Philippe Dauman, said publicly that the clustering of tentpole releases was keeping those films from making all the money they could if they were not in such close competition.

"[80] But Surowiecki noted Cartier and Liarte's conclusions that social factors within the industry played a part in the continuation of the release cycles that result in the dump months, due to the many uncertainties involved in producing and distributing a major motion picture and studio executives' desire to avoid blame for a big-budget film's commercial failure.

"If you open a blockbuster on Memorial Day and it fails, no one is going to blame you for your release strategy", Einav, who in his paper likened this phenomenon to the maxim on Wall Street that no one ever gets fired for recommending investors buy shares of IBM,[81] told him.

"[49] Responding later, in an indieWIRE panel discussion hosted by Anne Thompson, Universal Studios chairman Adam Fogelson agreed in principle with Fithian, saying "there are very few reasons other than historical behavior why almost any film can't work on almost any weekend ..." he said.

Surowiecki compared her to Billy Beane, former general manager of Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics, who likewise found a way for a smaller, less wealthy team to compete at the highest levels by using analytics to identify undervalued assets.

[8] For his part, Meslow points to Season of the Witch, a $40 million horror film starring Nicolas Cage which failed to recoup even that amount,[2] and Untraceable as emblematic of that kind of big-budget bust buried during dump months.

C. Robert Cargill, a former critic for Ain't It Cool News who scripted the successful 2012 horror film Sinister, points to Chronicle, which had a surprisingly strong opening on Super Bowl weekend earlier that year, an example.

Movies that also blend genres or defy such categorization, such as the zombie–human Romeo and Juliet retelling, Warm Bodies, or the limited-release Charlie Sheen comedy A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, are also ideal for their dump-months release time frame.

Cary Carling noted afterwards in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that recent Augusts had seen a number of critical and commercial successes, not only franchise movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum and Rise of the Planet of the Apes but films that appealed to adult audiences such as Blue Jasmine, The Help, and the James Brown biopic Get on Up, whose $14 million opening weekend against Guardians "met expectations.

He sees it as similar to what has happened to the TV schedule, where both broadcast and cable networks have begun airing new scripted shows during the summer, which was once relegated to reruns due to small audiences.

In that vein, playing on the movie's Japanese setting, he likened it to the supposed ancient custom of ubasute in that country, by which elderly people who could no longer care for themselves were purposely abandoned on mountainsides.

[92] Until 2010, the Chinese film industry also experienced sluggish domestic ticket sales during January and February, when that country celebrates the traditional New Year, or today the Spring Festival.