The dump months are what the film community has, before the era of streaming television, called the two periods of the year when there have been lowered commercial and critical expectations for most new theatrical releases from American filmmakers and distributors. Domestic audiences during these periods are smaller than the rest of the year, so no tentpole movies are released. January[1] and February are usually most commonly described this way, with August and September sometimes included.[2] Releases during those times primarily include films that would have been released at other times of year had they performed better at test screenings, films with less prominent stars, genre films (particularly horror), movies that cannot be easily marketed and films intended for a teenage audience, which has fewer entertainment options outside the home.
Several factors combine to create the dump months, most of them circumstances particular to the United States and Canada, the primary market for most major Hollywood releases. Both periods immediately follow the times of year in which the distributors concentrate films they expect to be the biggest critical and/or commercial successes, periods of increased spending on entertainment generally. While this often means that moviegoers have less disposable income afterward, economics alone does not explain the dump months. The weather and competition from other forms of mass entertainment, especially professional sports, also play a part; the winter dump months are further affected by the Academy Awards eligibility rules.
The dump months evolved over the course of the 20th century. Although during the studio era most major releases followed annual patterns similar to today's, several classics like The Kid, Shadow of a Doubt and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre were released during January, while Double Jeopardy was released during September. Since the decline of the studios, however, memorable films from the dump months have become rare exceptions. Notable examples of these for films released in January and February include The Silence of the Lambs, a well-reviewed box office smash that went on to win the 1991 Academy Award for Best Picture, and Get Out in 2017. In the late 1980s, Dirty Dancing and Fatal Attraction became hits following releases in August and September respectively.
Films released during the dump months have not always been consigned to cinematic oblivion. Some, like Tremors and Office Space, have become cult classics. Starting with Cloverfield, some 21st-century dump-months releases have managed to exceed $100 million on box office receipts. The similar success of low-budget horror films like The Devil Inside and Mama in the early 2010s has prompted studios to release films in that genre at times of the year other than Halloween and the dump months.
The term "dump months" comes from the belief that studios use the time periods in question as a "dumping ground" for movies they are contractually obligated to release but believe to have limited commercial prospects at best.[3] [4] [5] [6] "The big studios would never in a million years use this phrase", Dade Hayes, coauthor of Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became A National Obsession, told Newsday in August 2017. "[B]ut they do view [these times of year] as a dumping ground."[7]
Critics and journalists have no such reservations. "The first months of the year are known as the 'dump months' in Hollywood," wrote Vegas Seven critic Una LaMarche in early 2013, a period characterized by "movies that studios dislike, and want to release with little fanfare."[8] Likewise, Paul Shirey at JoBlo.com dismisses September as "one of the most worthless months at the box office."[9]
The earliest use of the term to turn up in a Google search is a 2007 article in the British newspaper The Guardian. "In the US, January is 'dump month' at the movies," critic Jonathan Bernstein wrote. "The films no studios believe in or care about ... suddenly become the sole choice available to regular filmgoers hungry for fresh fare." Use of the term became more common in the early 2010s.
While both dump-month periods immediately follow periods of greater movie attendance when event movies expected to be critical and/or commercial successes are released,[10] and periods of greater consumer spending generally there are also reasons specific to both periods that further dampen movie attendance to limit the expected box office returns to the extent that movies with strong potential will be scheduled for other times of year.[11] [12]
The main impediment to the release of highly anticipated or high-quality films in January and February is the calendar of the two major film awards, the Golden Globe Awards (January) and the Academy Awards, or "Oscars" (late February or early March), which overlap with those months. The winter weather also adds uncertainty to estimates of potential box office. Two holidays during the time provide some slight relief; however, they are offset by the distraction of Super Bowl weekend, which depresses spending on movies. The combined gross for all January releases 2002–2012 has averaged $387 million; for February it is $615 million. By comparison December, with its holiday releases, averages $1.2 billion.Spending is low to begin with since many consumers are cutting back and repaying debts incurred during the preceding holiday season, as well as having less free time, Jeremy Kirk of Firstshowing.net, when asked to explain the dearth of good films in January, notes that moviegoers are returning to their work and school routines during the month. C. Robert Cargill of Ain't It Cool News adds that only those over 35, "who have savings accounts and weren't tapped out by Christmas," can afford to go to the movies regularly then. He attributes the early-year success of Taken and its sequels to that market, as well as that of many of Clint Eastwood's recent films, to that older market.[13]
The website Box Office Mojo, which publishes reports on film grosses, divides the movie year into five seasons. It defines the winter season as lasting from the first day after New Year's week or weekend ends through the Thursday before the first Friday in March. The site's data go back to 1982, and in every year the winter season has had the lowest box office grosses. The weakest winter was 1983, when The Entitys $13 million take led the way to a total of $93.4 million in domestic grosses for all movies released during that season. On the other end, 2012 had the strongest winter, at $1.24 billion, topped by Safe House, which took in $124 million.[14]
At the end of the year comes the holiday movie season, when the studios release both tentpole movies, such as the latest installments in popular franchises that are expected to be highly successful and "Oscar bait" movies that are seen as likely to earn critical praise and, more importantly, nominations for major awards such as the Golden Globes and Oscars, the industry's most prestigious. Those nominations are then used to promote the film. But while the former nominations are announced in December with the awards themselves given in early January, the Academy Award nominations are announced after the Golden Globes, and the actual awards are not given until late February leaving most of the first two months of the year as Oscar season: a period during which any Golden Globes received as well as Oscar nominations can be used to promote the film to audiences, while studios lobby Academy members to vote for their nominees.
To be eligible for award consideration, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences requires that a film be shown in a theater in Los Angeles County, California, for at least seven consecutive days during which it is advertised in print media.[15] Studios hoping to position a film for some nominations usually satisfy that minimum requirement, then ease them into wide release from then until the nominations and/or awards ceremony. The flexibility this marketing strategy requires means that screens be available, and studios limit their releases of new films during this time to that end. As critic Ty Burr explained in a 2013 New York Times Magazine article on the mediocrity of new releases in the first month of the year: "[T]he studios ... know our attention is elsewhere."
New films shown publicly anywhere for the first time after January 1 themselves are ineligible for Oscars until the following year, by which time they will likely have been forgotten by critics, audiences and voters. The Silence of the Lambs, winner of the 1991 Academy Award for Best Picture, is a rare exception, as the only film in the post-studio era released in the first two months of its year to go on to win that Oscar.[16] Burr calls it "the grand exception to the January Movies Will Never Amount to Anything rule," and finds that only one other classic of the late 20th century, Dr. Strangelove, was a January release. The 2017 satirical horror film Get Out is another example of a movie released in the months of January and February that went on to be nominated for various Academy Awards such as Best Picture, eventually winning one for Best Original Screenplay.
Theaters will also still be running any holiday-season hits even if they had not been nominated for awards, further reducing the screens available for new movies. Ray Subers, an editor at Box Office Mojo, says there are two types of January moviegoer that keep December releases on screens throughout the months. "Discerning adult audiences", he told The Atlantic in 2012, spend the month congregating to those films on critics' lists for the best of the year they have not yet gotten to see, while "the general moviegoers are seeing the event films of December."
During January and February winter storms become more likely than they are in December. While they do not affect the entire U.S., the Northeast and Midwest are particularly prone to them, along with most neighboring areas of Canada. This includes many major metropolitan areas, and movie markets, in both countries.When winter storms hit, bringing with them combinations of precipitation that making driving difficult and sometimes dangerous, moviegoers often prefer to stay home. Non-essential travel is officially discouraged, and in severe enough weather all non-emergency driving can be banned in some areas until the situation improves.[17] In anticipation of the February 2013 nor'easter, which struck on the month's first weekend, three large chains closed down many of their theaters in the Northeast.[18] Industry analysts feared that the storm could seriously impact the box office prospects of two films opening that weekend, Identity Thief and Side Effects, both of which were seen as having potential to do better than most winter movies.[19] While it afterwards appeared that the two films were not seriously affected, and did better than expected, with Identity Thief even winning the weekend, despite generally poor reviews and word of mouth, with $36 million in receipts, overall box office was down 45 percent from the same weekend the previous year. Side Effects finished a distant third with a quarter of Identity Thiefs take. The clearest sign of the storm's effect, according to Box Office Mojo, was the 35 percent drop in earnings for Silver Linings Playbook, then in wide release after several Oscar nominations.[20]
While holiday weekends in the US generally increase film audiences and thus attract major releases throughout the year, the two that occur during these months—Martin Luther King Day in January and Presidents' Day in February—offer only a modest prospect for improvement. The most lucrative take by any movie on Martin Luther King Day weekend is $107.2 million by American Sniper in 2015, its first weekend in wide release;[21] the previous best opening weekend was Ride Along the previous year, taking in $41.5 million[22] ($48.6 million if the entire three-day holiday weekend is counted).
Presidents' Day benefits by its proximity to Valentine's Day (which, as it is always February 14, is often a weekday), which offers the studios enough chance of a payoff, usually from romantic comedies and other "chick flicks" marketed towards women as date movies. "[Some years] it's been six straight weeks of dreck until" that holiday, says Cargill.[13] Fifty Shades of Grey, the 2015 adaptation of the bestselling erotic novel, took in $93 million on its opening weekend, the largest take for a Presidents' Day weekend until Deadpool broke that record the year later. Valentine's Day, the 2010 romantic comedy with a large ensemble cast, is third with $63.1 million. Third among opening weekends is Ghost Rider, which took in $52 million in 2007; the best performance by a previously released film on President's Day weekend is the $62.4 million take by The Lego Movie, a week after its release in 2014.[23] [24] In 2018, the superhero film Black Panther set a new record for that holiday weekend with $235 million[25] In addition to the consistent popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, the critical praise and the holiday weekend, Marvel Studios took advantage of the fact that despite the month's supposed poor reputation for audience interest, as well as February's designation as Black History Month, a cultural event that made it an ideal time to release a film with such obvious African themes.[26]
Any boost movie grosses get from those two holidays, however, is offset by what typically comes between them. The Super Bowl, the annual championship game of the National Football League, has been in recent years played on either the last Sunday of January or the first one of February. It is accompanied by heavy media attention and frequent gatherings all over the country to watch the game on television, accompanied with food and beverages purchased with money that might otherwise be spent on movie tickets. "Does the Super Bowl affect ticket sales?" asks Scott Gwin at Cinemablend. "The answer, of course, is yes. In fact, there's a decent chance Budweiser spends more on advertising that Sunday than America does in theaters."[27]
The most successful film to open during Super Bowl weekend is the 2008 concert film , which took in $31.1 million, almost half the total it would earn during a released limited to just that weekend and the following week. In a close second is Dear John, grossing $30.5 million in 2010, for the strongest Super Bowl weekend opening for a conventional release.[28] Both films had strong appeal to female moviegoers, an audience more receptive to moviegoing on a weekend dominated by a sporting event. The 2008 action film Taken, which Cargill noted for its success in appealing to an older audience, took in $24.7 million on its opening weekend on its way to total receipts of over $100 million, making it a distant third.
The year's other dump period straddles the late summer and early fall. "As we enter the dog days of summer, we get the summer movie season dregs as well," wrote PopMatters editor Bill Gibron, anticipating August 2013.[29]
By the end of the summer seasonal jobs end, just as with the winter dump months, and moviegoers under the age of 24, who make up 41 percent of the audience, a larger share than their overall portion of the population,[30] begin to return to school.
Tuition payments, and retailers' back-to-school sales further cut into movie grosses; Huntington Bank's annual Backpack Index found in 2017 that costs for school supplies and activity fees, not including taxes or clothing, ranged from $662 for elementary-school students to almost $1,500 for those in high school.[31]
"The prevailing wisdom is that people don't go to the movies in August" due to family vacations (on which Americans spend almost $2,000 a year, on average[32]), summer camp, among other factors, Vulture complained as it pondered another potentially dreary month in 2008. While an August release can open as successfully as a film earlier in the summer, "[i]t just doesn't have the ability to run five or six weeks so there's a scramble for June and July," Ted Mundorff, head of Landmark Theatres, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2014. The type of films that interest younger audiences in the early summer, he elaborates, do not do well after Labor Day.
The summer dump period does not lend itself to being as clearly delineated as the winter dump months. In the past, it was usually considered to include all of August and September, and in some years still may. But, in years with many major summer movies, some may open on the first or second weekend of August to avoid competing with other such movies, such as Guardians of the Galaxy, the first-ever August release by Marvel Studios,[33] which earned $94 million over its North American opening weekend, setting a record for the month.[34] [35] It was the only summer film to earn over $300 million domestically, and became the first August release to be the summer's top grossing film in over three decades,[36] and was also one of the year's top-grossing films.[37]
It is August's last two weekends that are more universally seen as the beginning of the late-summer dump months,[38] when only forgettable films are likely to be released, with occasional exceptions like Dirty Dancing, which went on to make $63 million domestically from its release in late August 1987, and spawn several sequels and a franchise,[39] and Straight Outta Compton, which stayed at number one for three consecutive weeks in mid and late August 2015 en route to making $161 million domestically.
At the beginning of September is the annual American celebration of Labor Day, the only holiday weekend during this period. Of all the year's holiday weekends it has reliably been the weakest in terms of movie box office, with the top opener and overall grosser for the weekend being 2021's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings at $94.6 million, far surpassing the previous record holder, 2007's Rob Zombie-directed reimagining of Halloween, with $30.5 million. Shang-Chi also broke that film's record for overall gross for a film released on Labor Day weekend, its $224.5 million take again far outpacing Halloweens $58.3 million.[40]
Once September begins, younger moviegoers are preoccupied with starting the school year and thus less likely to go to the movies on weeknights than they were in summertime.[41] As with the winter months, football also has an impact at the box office as not only NFL teams but college and high school teams resume play, primarily on weekends. "[W]e are left with a series of movies competing for box office scraps in a month when Hollywood assumes no one goes to the movies," says a Yahoo critic.[42] [43]
Some September movies have triumphed critically and commercially. In 1987, Fatal Attraction, which opened in wide release on September 18 succeeded at the box office, staying in theaters through June of the next year[44] and also garnered six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.[45] Twelve years later, in 1999, the similarly successful American Beauty, which had been in limited release through September before going wide in October,[46] won that award and four others.[47]
September's counterpart to Sundance, the Toronto International Film Festival, is held at the end of the month. The film community's attention is focused on the Canadian city. Critics gather to see potential Oscar contenders among the many independent films on the program and studio executives look to line up distribution deals with the same prize in mind. Some of the best are released within a week or so, ending the September dump period.[48]
In past years, October also was when eagerly anticipated horror films reached screens, to capitalize on the approach of Halloween at the end of the month. However, this began to change in the 2000s due to the way series such as the Saw and Paranormal Activity films dominated that period, prompting distributors of other horror films to consider releasing them during the winter dump months instead. In 2012 Paramount enjoyed huge success with the unheralded The Devil Inside, released right after New Year's Day[49] despite a strongly negative critical and audience reaction; the next year Mama was received enthusiastically by critics and filmgoers when it came out on Martin Luther King Day weekend[50] after being rescheduled from the previous October to avoid going up against Sinister and Paranormal Activity 4. Only one major horror film, the third adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, was released in October 2013, and it underperformed. "At your local multiplex, the spirit of Halloween is, sadly, dead," Matt Barone wrote in Complex. "Horror's now too big of a business for major studios to care much about October."[51] [52]
The dump months' obstacles are reflected in their box office totals, particularly the success of movies opening during those months. January's strongest domestic opening weekend ever was the $90 million American Sniper took in when it went into wide release on Martin Luther King Day weekend in 2015. The best opening weekend for a movie seeing screens for the first time in January was the $42 million pulled in by Ride Along the year before; it is the lowest best opening weekend gross for any month.