Hollywood places big bets on the spring season
Summer and Christmastime no longer only times studios release biggest movie titles
“Suddenly, what was once kind of a slow period became a land of opportunity, and now the secret is out.” PAUL DERGARABEDIAN SENIOR MEDIA ANALYST, COMSCORE
For more than 40 years, Steven Spielberg’s movies have followed a simple, binary release strategy. Without exception, his films have either opened in the summer — a movie-going season he all but invented with the 1975 smash Jaws — or toward the end of the year as awards buzz is heating up.
The formula is so predictable, you can almost set a watch by it.
Yet when executives at Warner Bros. sat down with the director to discuss the release plan for his latest film, the big-budget sci-fi-action epic Ready Player One, they had something different in mind. Set in a nearfuture dystopia in which people live much of their lives in a virtual-reality realm called the OASIS, Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s bestselling novel has all the bells and whistles of a big, fun summer movie.
But the studio wanted to open it in March, a month that has not seen the release of a Spielberg movie since his first feature, The Sugarland Express, hit theatres on March 31, 1974.
Until fairly recently, such a move would have been almost unthinkable. For decades, spring was largely considered a kind of dead zone in Hollywood’s release calendar, an island of cinematic misfit toys lacking a coherent identity or much inherent appeal for film distributors.
“In everyone’s minds, there’s the holiday season, there’s awards season, there’s the summer movie season and then there’s spring,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for the data firm ComScore. “What the hell is spring?”
But that is changing quickly. Over the last several years, the period running roughly from Valentine’s Day through the end of April has become an increasingly vital window for the studios to release some of their biggest films.
The next few months will see a slew of high-profile would-be blockbusters hit the multiplexes, including the climax of the erotic trilogy Fifty Shades Freed (Feb. 9), the Marvel film Black Panther (Feb. 16), director Ava DuVernay’s fantasy epic A Wrinkle in Time (March 9), a reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise (March 16), Ready Player One (March 30) and the X-Men spinoff The New Mutants (April 13).
2018’s tentpole-packed first quarter follows a 2017 spring season that shattered box office records. Fuelled by smashes like Beauty and the Beast (the second-highest grossing film of 2017 after Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Logan and The Fate of the Furious, collective domestic grosses in March and April reached nearly $2 billion (U.S.), a benchmark that seemed inconceivable not so long ago. Meanwhile, February saw three films — The Lego Batman Movie, Get Out and Fifty Shades Darker — clear the $100million mark domestically, tying the record for the month.
For Hollywood, the growing poten- cy of the spring season over the last decade has essentially been a case of “if you build it, they will come.” As studios started to move larger films like Fast and Furious, Alice in Wonderland and The Hunger Games into time frames once relatively lacking in box office fireworks, audiences followed.
“Suddenly, what was once kind of a slow period became a land of opportunity,” Dergarabedian says. “And now the secret is out.”
For moviegoers, March will feel almost like a summer month, with at least one studio tentpole opening every weekend. On March 2, 20th Century Fox’s spy thriller Red Sparrow will hit theatres, reuniting Jennifer Lawrence — who plays a deadly Russian assassin — with director Francis Lawrence, who helmed three of the four Hunger Games films.
Later in the month, Alicia Vikander will play a very different fierce female character, archeologist and adventurer Lara Croft, in Warner Bros. and MGM’s video game-adaptation reboot Tomb Raider.
Despite the increased competition in March, Disney expects A Wrinkle in Time — with its potent pedigrees of Madeleine L’Engle’s much-loved book and stars Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling — to perform strongly.
Heading into April, Fox will hope to follow up the success last February of superhero film Logan with director Josh Boone’s The New Mutants, which introduces a fresh group of young characters into the X-Men cinematic universe.
A week later, on April 20, Warner Bros. will tap the star power of Dwayne Johnson in the sci-fi-action film Rampage, which is loosely based on a popular video game series and features a slew of giant beasts not entirely unlike those seen in Kong: Skull Island, which proved a hit for the studio last March.
Of course, even as spring has become an increasingly hospitable home for tentpole movies that may feel slightly too risky to place in the heart of the summer, it does have its limitations. Aside from spring break and the occasional holiday, kids are in school and the ability to rack up big grosses in midweek showings is generally reduced. And odds are a movie released early in the year may have a tough time sticking in people’s minds all the way until awards season — though Universal’s Get Out is a bona-fide contender nearly a year after its release.
In the end, whatever the time of year, when it comes to releasing movies, the only thing that’s truly certain is that nothing is truly certain. “Every time we think we have a rule that’s made sense in the past, something will come along — either by accident or by design — and will just blow it up, in a very positive way,” says Jim Orr, president of domestic distribution at Universal Pictures.