The Late Summer Doldrums

It's September. It's a few degrees too warm, the kids are back in school, and the biggest movie opening this weekend is another installment of a low-budget horror franchise, this time "Insidious: Chapter 2." Welcome to the summer doldrums. August and September are not the worst time of year for films, but it usually feels that way. January and February are a dumping ground for disappointing studio pictures that they don't know what to do with, but at least it's Oscar season, so smaller prestige releases pick up the slack. Late August and early September, on the other hand, offer such slim pickings that this is when many film critics ignore the theatrical slates and hit the festival circuit.

Speaking of festivals, right now some of the hotly anticipated fall releases like "Gravity" and "12 Years a Slave" are having their premieres at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, building up the hype for Oscar season. However, the bulk of these films aren't going to start hitting theaters until October. The only September releases with any real buzz behind them are Ron Howard's "Rush," about a pair of rival Formula One racers, and the Denis Villeneuve thriller "Prisoners." They both open September 20th. Both are reportedly very solid, mature dramas, but don't have quite the push behind them that something like "Captain Phillips" will. If you're a major contender, the accepted wisdom is that you want to open later in the year, so that you won't fade from the public's consciousness before Oscar night. September is still a little early for the heavy hitters.

So of you want to see something today, you're looking at theaters mostly full of the tired, worn out remainders of a summer season that didn't make anybody happy. August releases tend to be second string summer crowd-pleasers, the more niche pictures and the ones that the studios didn't think would be as big a draw as the pictures released in June and July. So it's here that we find bottom of the barrel stuff like "Getaway," "Mortal Instruments," and "Paranoia." It's here that films like "The Butler" top the charts for three consecutive weeks. Grown-ups have more free time with the kids in school, so you see a shift toward movies that appeal to them in September. Box office oddities are more prevalent here, like Spanish language film, "Instructions Not Included," coming out of nowhere to land in the top five.

Late summer is also the time of year you hear the most complaints about the state of the movies. It's when the whiners and grousers point to all the weightless summer action flicks, and insist that the medium is in danger of being destroyed by Hollywood's incompetence. This year has been particularly doom and gloom because of a string of expensive, high profile bombs. We also didn't have any big, critically-acclaimed, must-see pictures that won the near-universal love of mainstream audiences, as there have been in the past. The closest thing we had to an "Avengers" this year was maybe "Iron Man 3" or "Despicable Me 2," fun films that lots of people saw and enjoyed, but few really loved.

There are a few bright spots like "The Butler" and "The World's End," movies that would have had no chance in the furious scrum of the overprogrammed June and July months. "Elysium" and "Wolverine" are still lingering at the end of their runs, and "Riddick" made it to the top of the pack by opening last week. Depending on where you are, there are plenty of art house offerings like "Blue Caprice," "Blue Jasmine" and "The Spectacular Now" in circulation. The second run theaters are full of summer films that you might have missed over the previous weeks. Or many like "The Great Gatsby" and "Now You See Me" are on home media already. There's a deficit of hype for anything at the moment, so it's a good time to go play catch up.

However, there's no denying that things have slowed down, and personally I don't think that's a bad thing. We're about to go into another competitive Oscar season, and the holiday slate is positively stuffed with big films. Nobody is going to be complaining about a lack of good options to watch in October or November. It helps to think of late summer as a palate cleanser, a chance to regroup and switch gears from explosions to awards banter. I don't think that it's a coincidence that September is the start of the fall television season, and all the entertainment reporting is focused on the small screen for a few weeks. If you're missing the superhero movies, "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." may help tide you over until November.

Or you can do what I'm doing, which is to catch up on Netflix shows and be secretly glad I'm going to have a lot to binge on soon.
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