question of the day: What is it with January and bad movies?

The Oscar voters may think they can remember good movies all year long, but when it's time to give out the awards, they pretty clearly don't remember anything before October. If you're like me, and you read way too much "entertainment news," then you can spend January through April each year reading about the highly acclaimed movies that got overlooked. Maybe this will be the year that Inglourious Basterds wins Best Picture, but I think it will be lucky to get a statue for Best Original Screenplay.

Well, a lot of TV shows start/come back from hiatus in January - maybe the TV and movie execs are working in tandem so there isn't too much competition. Weird and unlikely, yes, but stranger things have happened.

Well, a lot of TV shows start/come back from hiatus in January - maybe the TV and movie execs are working in tandem so there isn't too much competition. Weird and unlikely, yes, but stranger things have happened.

You know, that actually sounds plausible. September is also considered a "dumping ground" month and that's when a lot of tv shows have their season premieres.

What we have here is a conventional wisdom put together with a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Back in Ye Olden Dayes (i.e., 1930-1950), Hollywood studios saw a drop-off in movie attendance for the month of January. So they learned that that was the month in which to dump movies that they didn't have much hope for, commercially.

But there are vast differences between the market then and the market now. No one has had a huge blockbuster that opened in January, but back in the Ye Olden Dayes, the summer wasn't considered great movie-watching territory, either.

Have things changed enough so that some blockbuster might come out in January? No one knows, and the way the studios are managed, no one ever will.

At this point, the studios save up their absolute crap (or movies so different they don't know what to do with them, like Gilliam's work) to release in January.

And round and round and round she goes.

While I agree with you, MaryAnn, about studios spreading the wealth, I'm OKAY with January (and February) as dumping ground for meh/sucktastic films because unlike critics such as yourself, we normal folks don't get paid/have the time to watch ALL of the Oscar/prestige films that came out in November and December. I use January and February to catch up on most of them before the Oscars. It's a system that works just fine for me.

January is also the time when most of those prestige films goes wide (see Slumdog Millionaire last year). So with the crappy films, we see good quality films in theaters anyways.

we critics are perfectly capable of recalling movies from earlier in the year

I'm sure you are, but really, do you think most of the Academy voters have long enough memories or will go to the trouble? I don't see anyone talking now about the films you reviewed at the start of 2009. As long as one studio dumps all its Oscar-bait at the end of the year, the others have to follow.

I suspect that this practice will only change when someone has an accidental blockbuster with a January-released film.

The UK for some years had a system of vehicle numberplates such that the year of first registration was shown by a letter on the plate. This led to something like 1/3 of new car sales being in the month after the new letter became available. I fear that you may be seeing a similar effect in reverse.