August has always been considered something of a dumping ground for Hollywood. But this year it's not a dumping ground; it's a dead zone. BilgeEbiri writes
Studios usually take this month to dump less-anticipated but still potentially thrilling films into the box office. But this year it’s a dead zone, not even a Jason Statham action joint in sight. Photo: STXfilms/YouTube Hollywood’s big comeback summer has abruptly ended, and it couldn’t have happened at a more inopportune time. Over the past several months, on the heels of the box-office bonanza of Top Gun: Maverick, we’ve seen more and more stories about the resurgence of movie theaters.
There are a number of reasons for this slowdown. Some are systemic. Some are specific to this moment in time. COVID and supply-chain issues have held up many productions going back to last year, and even earlier. Partly related to this, there’s also currently a massive postproduction backlog, which means, among other things, that visual effects can’t be finished on time.
But we aren’t even getting “August movies” this year. This month is not a dumping ground, but a dead zone. And this year, the situation should have been different, because the spring and summer didn’t give us the glut of big releases that they would in the pre-pandemic past. This could have been a great opportunity to give some audience-friendly movies bigger runs, or to bump up a couple of releases.
And don’t even get me started on Amazon and Netflix, which often have any number of films that could be given a more prominent theatrical push, or any theatrical push at all. Did The Gray Man really have to open the same week as Nope? It seems like it would have been an ideal August movie. As does Kevin Hart’s The Man From Toronto. And Thirteen Lives, a stacked-cast Ron Howard film, got a mostly meaningless one-week theatrical run ahead of its Prime Video premiere this past week.