Why Is There Nothing to Watch in Theaters Right Now?

Controversial opinion incoming: Going to the movies is... nice. It's dark, quiet, and usually a good temperature; you can continually funnel junk food into your mouth at an almost vertical incline without anyone seeing; and you are obligated not to look at your phone for two straight hours. Bliss.

There are, naturally, downsides. It's prohibitively expensive, for one. (Pour one out for MoviePass, which tried to solve this problem via a unique method of "basically giving people all the company's money and hoping it works out in the long-term somehow.") Also, what if the movie sucks? It's getting harder to tell: critics and general audiences feel increasingly at war with each other over what constitutes a quality film, let alone a fun filmgoing experience. Never is that risk higher than at the beginning of the year, a time best described as "a flaming Hollywood dumping ground."

The legend of the "January movie dump" (which—sorry!—often extends into February and beyond) is nothing new. It's almost like a science at this point: movies that either aren't expected to perform beyond expectations or perhaps have suffered a little too much studio meddling are apt to be slotted into the Q1 wasteland to die quiet, dignified deaths. This happens overwhelmingly with genre films. Have you heard a peep about the once-promising Grudge remake since it came out three weeks ago? Thought not. Remember 2019's The Bye Bye Man? You don't, because that dude lived up to his name and then some. Frankly, TBT to Dolittle, one of the biggest crashes in recent memories. But on the face of it, it seems counterintuitive, no? We're slap bang in the middle of awards season, when the average public awareness of "the movies" is higher than most of the rest of the year, the weather almost uniformly sucks, making a trip to an indoor activity all the more appealing. There's nothing to do in January anyway besides shirk resolutions and struggle to get out of bed (just me?). This should be prime moviegoing season, and instead, we've been conditioned to write it off, waiting for late April when the Avengers-style blockbusters start creeping onto screens again.

Call me crazy, but if I were an eccentric studio executive in charge of multimillion-dollar films (note to Hollywood: I am available and my first and only idea is National Treasure 3) I would simply use the opportunity the dearth of quality cinema represents this time of year and... release good movies! Everyone's already seen Parasite (though they should see it again), and while your parents pretended to like Ford v Ferrari, no one actually turned out to that. For confirmation that we're not crazy for feeling like this, GQ reached out to James Shapiro, COO of Drafthouse Films, to get some more industry insight on why movie options at the moment are either Oscar leftovers or bad genre flops-to-be. "[The beginning of the year] has a lot of studio dumps but it also has a lot of success stories," he says. "Usually, the first week in January is very good to horror movies but bad word of mouth killed The Grudge remake."

So maybe we just got unlucky this year? There are, of course, exceptions that prove the rule. Are we so quick to forget Paddington 2 was a January movie? How about M. Night Shyamalan's reintroduction of himself as a major genre filmmaker in 2017's Split? It might be true we currently have fewer great movies to check out right now, but that only makes finding the gems that much more satisfying. (Note to self: Maybe just go rewatch Uncut Gems this weekend).

Here’s what to watch at home this weekend.

Originally Appeared on GQ