The best time of the year to release a movie, according to science
Let’s face it, there are times when going to the cinema feels like a brilliant idea, and other times when the last thing you want to do is sit in a dark room with some coughing strangers eating £7 bags of Skittles.
The movie industry carefully monitors this kind of thing, so if you’re a director releasing a new film, what’s the month to do it in?
Well, thankfully, there are clever people, you know the ones who can make pie charts and graphs and stuff, who have worked it all out, so if you’re Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg, and who knows you might well be, read on to discover how to avoid your latest sci-fi or fantasy Greek war epic from flopping at the first hurdle.
The boffins at Stat Significant have taken loads of historic film release information and fed it into a supercomputer and it emerges that the rain-soaked month we’ve just gratefully seen the back of, January, is without doubt the worst possible month to put a movie into cinemas, with only one film in history released in January winning an Oscar – the suitably depressing 1992 smash The Silence of the Lambs.
According to the research, ‘Dumpuary’ is so-called because it’s the month that studios will get films off their balance sheets and into cinemas that they don’t think are going to cut the mustard, either having had poor initial reviews or audience screenings. Most releases, meanwhile, will be weighted toward the end of the year, with a post-summer spike in September and October.
Of course, there are traditionally big moments for studios in the year that they will tailor making films toward and always have – Christmas, especially and summer blockbusters, although they know that if they release a film in the hottest months, they have to balance people not wanting to miss out on the sun, and some folk wanting some air-conditioned respite.
Some 15% of all movie revenue is in the month of December, compared to just 4% in January and 5% in February. This year is likely to be no exception, and in fact could be the biggest month on record, because it happens to be Avengers Doomsday year, the Russo Brothers movie that unites pretty much every superhero in history and is on track to be the most expensive film ever made and hits cinemas in December, the same day in fact as Dune 3.
But they might well be missing a trick, because historically, according to the site, the best month to release a movie that costs over $10million to make is in fact June, with an average box office gross of $247m, May coming second with $227m and December third at $200m.
If it’s Academy Award recognition that directors are after, then again, it’s December that comes out on top, with a 25% share of movies that resulted in Oscar nominations, compared to just 14% in the first four months of the year combined. The most nominated film in history is, of course, this year’s Sinners, with 16, and that went against the grain somewhat by being released in April.
As for the highest-grossing movie in history, that would be James Cameron’s Avatar, released on December 10th, 2009, and so successful that for the following 22 years we will be forced to sit through endless sequels that we didn’t ask for.
