Winter Movies Suck While Oscar Season is Overcrowded
Why Hollywood needs to improve their predictable release schedule.
Excited about a new movie in production? If its release is in January or February, you might want to lower your expectations.
Hollywood — and its audience — have become accustomed to a pattern: fall is for Oscar hopefuls, summer is for blockbusters, and winter — well, winter is the dumping ground for everything else.
Has there always been this predictable tri-season schedule? And is there actually a correlation between quality and the time of the year a movie is released?
Using proprietary data from Taste, we collected standardized user ratings from movies released in the past 30 years. We then graphed these user ratings by the season (Off-Season, Summer, Oscar) from 1986 to 2015.
Here’s our results:
Here’s what we found:
- Movies released between September-December (Oscar season) do in fact consistently produce the highest rated movies.
- Movies released in December earned the highest average rating, while March movies received the lowest.
- Summer and Oscar season movies got worse over the years, but started to rebound after 2005.
- Prior to 2005, off-season and summer movies trended equally. After that point, summer movies have improved while off-season movies continued to get worse.
- In 2015, Oscar movies (on average) saw 37.5% better user ratings than off-season movies, the widest gap in quality from any given year.
There seems to be a clear turning point after the year 2005. This is likely due to the wide adoption of social media around this time, when word-of-mouth and online critics became increasingly influential in swaying public opinion and purchasing decisions. With social media, studios could no longer hide behind bad reviews — perhaps with more transparency, studios have improved the quality of their work.
Or — perhaps movie quality hasn’t improved, but instead studios have simply become more strategic with when they release their movies.
If an Oscar hopeful isn’t testing well prior to release, a studio might push its release to the winter. Some of these delayed movies include:
Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, The Monuments Men is an action drama focusing on…www.taste.io
So how do studios stop training moviegoers to care less about winter releases ?
This studio release schedule is understandable: prestige pics released late in the year are fresh in the minds of Academy members who begin Oscar voting in January, while summer blockbusters are targeted to kids and teens on summer break.
But when prestige pics are so overcrowded in the fall, they’re forced to compete for attention and so many fantastic movies fall under the radar. And when summers are too crowded with blockbusters/remakes/sequels, audiences grow tired of the same old shitck. (2016, anyone?)
If the Academy adopted a new voting system, where members reported their favorite films from the past four months — 3 times a year — the best films, normally released in the fall, would be spread out over the course of many more months. Audiences would be able to see more of the Oscar-caliber movies, summers would feature a stronger balance between teen blockbusters and intelligent adult-fare, and winters would no longer be the off-seasons they are today.
All stats come from Taste, where we gather millions of movie ratings from users across 150 countries.
