Posted in: Movies | Tagged: box office, film, HRL

Dead Box Office Walking: Who Is To Blame?

Published Sun, 27 Aug 2017 12:39:00 -0500

There haven't been a lot of movie reviews running on the site this month, and there's a reason for that. August 2017 has proved to be one of the deadest months in terms of releases this year. That's why mediocre movies like The Hitman's Bodyguard took another weekend with a pathetic $10.1 million. There are a couple reasons why this is happening — and they might not be the ones you think. First of all, let's talk about the timeline of a year in terms of when major films get released.

There are multiple times of the year when you can predict when a certain type of movie is going to come out. They are usually broken down like this:

January–mid-February: Awards season. All of the movies that are trying to win Oscars get wide releases in the beginning of the year. To qualify for an award, you only need to run in the Los Angeles area for a week at minimum. That's why there are so many limited releases around Christmas that go wide in the beginning of the year.
Mid-February–end of April: The winter to spring zone used to be a time when nothing would come out. The idea being that everyone is out of money from the holidays and the first thing to go out the door is non-essential things like going to the movies. However, this time of year is almost the "pre blockbuster" now, with studios realizing if they release bigger movies in March, they can dominate the box office for weeks on end.
May–end of July: The blockbuster season. This is when Hollywood usually pulls out the big guns, the family movies, because the kids are out of school. It's hot out, in the northern hemisphere anyway, and the best place to go is kill some time in a movie theater.
August–mid-September: The dead zone. It's too early to start releasing anything for the awards season because Oscar voters are old and might forget your movie if you release it too early. The kids are going back to school so the blockbuster season has ended.
Mid-September–end of December: It's time for the award season to begin. This is when anything trying to win an Academy Award starts trickling out. It also has become a sort of second blockbuster period, with huge movies opening in November and December to great results. Kids don't want to see Oscar bait, so let's go see Star Wars for a third time instead.

So here we are, at the end of August, and the box office is a wasteland. In terms of big releases, the last one was probably The Dark Tower, which was killed by critics and audiences alike. The last big movie that was a critical and commercial success was Dunkirk back in July. The studios are quick to place the blame on audiences and say that it's all streaming services' fault, but that's not the case. They are also tossing the blame onto the Mayweather-McGregor fight and Hurricane Harvey, but the truth is they have no one to blame but themselves. No one is going to the movies because you aren't releasing anything.

This "dead zone" was declared a thing that exists and now it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. "We don't want to bomb in the dead zone, so let's not release anything. Wait, no one is going to the movies? Why is this? We must blame Netflix!" The movie industry would benefit greatly from getting rid of this whole idea in the first place. There are so many blockbuster movies being made now and they need time to make back their money. If you're releasing huge movies one right after the other, only a few are truly going to make anything back in terms of profit. You might win your opening weekend, but staying in the top 5 for multiple weeks is just as important, if not more so.

Next year, it has been predicted by some that the entire blockbuster movie industry could collapse in on itself. There are so many movies coming out next year with massive budgets that need to make back their money. Disney, for some reason, is releasing Avengers: Infinity War and the Han Solo movie less than a month apart. Studios like Disney are going to cannibalize their own releases. Meanwhile, everyone else is throwing massive amounts of money hoping to be the "next big thing" without any idea of how to actually do that. These blockbusters need time to make back their budgets, but as long as Hollywood doesn't take advantage of these so-called "dead zones", next summer could get ugly.

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