Has September Become the Bleakest Month at the Movie Theaters?

Who’s excited to see…’The Identical’?

The dog days of August may be behind us, but the September doldrums are just beginning at multiplexes nationwide. In fact, compared to the line-up of mainstream studio offerings that’s in store for us over the next few weekends, last month looks like a veritable moviegoers’ paradise. Once considered the film industry’s dumping ground, August 2014 boasted such gargantuan hits as Guardians of the Galaxy (the year’s reigning box office champ, at least until the next Hunger Games comes along) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as solid mid-level successes like If I Stay and Let’s Be Cops. Even the stinkers like The Expendables 3 and As Above, So Below didn’t prove too much of a drag; according to Box Office Mojo, this was the most profitable August in years, with the industry earning a cool billion in overall business.

Don’t assume that Hollywood stopped making dud summer movies, though. It’s just that they pushed most of them to September. You know the cupboard is bare when the highest-profile release this weekend is the IMAX version of Forrest Gump — a movie that’s almost the legal drinking age. The only major releases going up opposite Tom Hanks and his box of chocolates are the Ashley Judd-led faith-based musical drama The Identical and the latest YA adaptation, Innocence. The weekend of Sept. 12 looks equally bereft, with the family-skewing Dolphin Tale 2 swimming into the market opposite the thriller No Good Deed, starring Idris Elba and Taraji P. Henson. Things may pick up the following Friday, Sept. 19, as late-career action star Liam Neeson returns in his latest shoot-first, talk-later picture A Walk Among the Tombstones, but both the YA-skewing The Maze Runner and the dramedy This Is Where I Leave You are open questions in terms of their quality and chances for financial success. It’s only at the tail end of the month that a true box office hero — Denzel Washington — will arrive to save the day with his sure-to-be popular shoot ‘em up, The Equalizer on Sept. 26.

September wasn’t always this much of a wasteland. Travel back thirty years ago to September ‘84 and you’ll see that successful, well-liked movies such as A Soldier’s Story, Amadeus, All of Me, and Irreconcilable Differences were released within three weeks of each other. And twenty years ago in September ‘94, moviegoers could choose between Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption, Ed Wood and the underrated Meryl Streep action picture, The River Wild.

But leap ahead to September ‘04 and you can see the current state of affairs start to take shape, as weekend after weekend served up instantly forgettable offerings like Paparazzi, Wicker Park, Mr. 3000, Wimbledon, and First Daughter. (On the other hand, Shaun of the Dead arrived on these shores the last weekend in September, so at least the month wasn’t a total loss.)

So why exactly has this month become the new August and/or January, another notorious dumping ground? There are a couple of likely culprits. To begin with, September naturally gets off to a snoozy start thanks to Labor Day, the unofficial end-of-summer holiday that bookends Memorial Day. If the latter is one of Hollywood’s biggest weekends of the year when audiences are primed to go to the movies, come Labor Day it generally seems as if everybody’s too busy soaking up those last ounces of summer to even think of venturing inside a theater. It’s a snoozy holiday weekend where everyone is on vacation, including the folks in charge of releasing movies.

Even back in the aforementioned good ole days of ‘84 and ‘94, Labor Day was essentially programmed with tumbleweeds blowing across the screen. Of course, things tended to ramp up fairly quickly after that — A Soldier’s Story and Quiz Show both opened on Sept. 14 in their respective decades — but in recent years, it’s as if Hollywood has simply decided to extend the holiday a little bit longer, perhaps to accommodate folks returning to school and work. (Let’s also not forget that a more tragic day of remembrance now follows Labor Day — Sept. 11. It can be understandably dicey to release certain kinds of movies, including comedies and action fare, on or around that terrible anniversary.)

Another thing that’s changed within the past decade is the huge growth of the fall movie festival season. The prestigious Venice Film Festival and the buzzy Telluride Film Festival are both unspooling as the calendar switches over from August to September, while the all-important Toronto International Film Festival dominates the conversation the first two weeks of the month. It’s at these three festivals, followed by the New York Film Festival towards the end of September, that the studios premiere many of their highest-profile fall releases, the ones that stand the best chance of becoming box office and awards season blockbusters.

But here’s the rub: A healthy chunk of them won’t be in general release for the paying public for upwards of a month and longer. In the meantime, the industry need something to put in theaters, so they tend to program titles that don’t require a lot of attention and advertising dollars, either because they have a built-in audience or because nobody expects success from them in the first place. The Resident Evil flicks, all of which have been released in September save for the first one, are prime examples of the ideal September movie from a studio’s perspective.  They have built-in name recognition and a strong fanbase that turns out for each installment; they’re critic-proof; and they don’t demand the expense of Oscar campaigns.

Speaking of Oscars, September was once a prime season to launch awards-friendly movies. A Soldier’s Story and Amadeus both secured Best Picture nominations in ‘84 (with Amadeus eventually winning), as did Shawshank and Quiz Show in ‘94 (though both lost out to Gump). Even as late as 1999, DreamWorks saw fit to start beating its drum for American Beauty midway through the month, opening the film on Sept. 15 and guiding it all the way to the Shrine Auditorium dais. But in ‘04, the Mira Nair-directed, Reese Witherspoon-starring adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was the only high-profile awards-friendly movie that graced screens that month. (It ultimately failed to pick up any Academy Award nominations.) That’s the same year that Clint Eastwood popularized the idea of the “December surprise,” sneaking Million Dollar Baby in at the tail end of the race and cruising to victory. After that, more studios held off on releasing their big guns until later in the season, substituting festival try-outs for general releases. 

These days though, you can generally count on one company to try and get a jump on the awards race in September while everyone else waits for October and beyond. Results have been mixed. In 2007, Warner Bros. released its art-house skewing Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and earned stellar reviews and two nominations, for Casey Affleck and Roger Deakins’ gorgeous cinematography. And in 2012, The Weinstein Company rolled out Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, picking up nominations for its three stars, Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams.  (The Weinsteins appear to be employing that strategy again this year, releasing the James McAvoy/Jessica Chastain drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby on Sept. 12.)

On the other hand, a September berth didn’t help the Oscar chances of the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading in 2008 or Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! the following year. Even if some of these select movies fail to go the distance in terms of awards, they do accomplish a more important goal: They give moviegoers a reasons to go to the theater in an otherwise increasingly drab month.