Well, the Oscars are over, so it's time to switch gears and look ahead to the summer movie season. It's a time so many of us love, and so many dread: giant, $100+ million-budget movies coming to screens week after week, delighting us in a wave of spectacle and drowning everything else in their wake. Thankfully, we have some time to prepare ourselves for the onslaught. Specifically, we've got as much time as it'll take to get to the nearest multiplex to watch Logan, the first movie of Summer 2017. Yes, it's March 3rd, and summer has officially arrived.
I know what you're thinking: The studios have regularly put out a blockbuster or two in the spring, that doesn't mean they're actually starting summer early, right? Let's set aside for a moment that in recent years the already tenuous start of the summer movie season in early-May had advanced into late-April. Let's ignore the big-budget blockbusters—the kind directed by Zack Snyder, like Watchmen, Sucker Punch, and Batman v Superman—that studios were afraid to have compete in the middle of summer.
Instead let's take an accounting of the movies coming out this month, March 2017:
March 3: Logan ($127 million budget)
March 10: Kong: Skull Island ($190 million budget)
March 17: Beauty and the Beast ($160 million budget)
March 24: Power Rangers ($120 million budget)
March 31: Ghost in the Shell ($100+ budget rumored)
That's five weekends and five big-budget tentpoles. The summer season, which had already broken well outside the confines of the actual summer months, has now officially cemented as the operating model for the movie business practically year round. From March to September, there's hardly a week without a huge release, and every other month has at least two or three.
Truth be told, we all saw this coming; there have been warnings and warning signs for years. As the risk of theatrical distribution increases, and the international markets become more and more important, the bets need to be big enough to match. An occasional mid-range success like La La Land is nice, but the real money is in the $200 million film that brings home over $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Meanwhile, all the doomsayers have been proven wrong at every turn. The business model Hollywood has constructed can certainly result in failures and huge write-offs, but the successes almost always cover those losses, and then some. And if a studio has a particularly bad year, the response is almost always to pool the money even more into the surefire smash based on existing intellectual property.
It wasn't so long ago that people were amazed at the early-April success of Fast & Furious, the fourth entry in the increasingly absurd car crime saga. It was the Fast franchise that broke the doors wide open for true experimentation with blockbuster releases in the early months of the year. The franchise has since dabbled in May releases, but has come back to April, confident in owning the marketplace of the month it helped build. But as the field becomes more and more crowded, it's hard to say that the month of release matters much at all. Sure, there's a bit of a downswing for new releases post-Christmas. A glut of big-budget fare and Oscar contenders compete for attention well into February, but after that? It's open season.
Fox clearly understood this when they positioned Logan for its big outing only one week after the Oscars. Last year, they had put out the similarly R-rated Deadpool into theaters in February and it became one of 2016's biggest grossers. With Logan, they took the approach of being slightly more cautious. If anything, that cautiousness might backfire slightly. With Kong: Skull Island hot on its heels next week, Logan could see a huge opening weekend, but without the real legs Deadpool found in those quieter weeks of February.
Still, the model here is clear. With the summer months so crowded, and the post-Oscars frenzy over, the studios are ready to push their product any time they can. March was just sitting there. Why not fill it?
The problem, such as it is, is that as the blockbuster formula slowly infects literally every available weekend of the year, there's less and less room for the smaller films. It's a lot to hope that any will be able to break through. Consider Get Out, with its modest budget and its open assault on white liberal racism. The film won its opening weekend with a cool $30 million. But that's nothing compared to the $170 million Logan is expected to pull in this weekend. What happens when the summer season eventually consumes February? Or even January? Will there be any room at all for a film like Get Out, other than as sly counter-programming that can only hope for modest returns and some cultural conversation?
Of course, this is where the new age of TV and streaming barges in to save the day. TV. So good right now! All the best filmmakers want to do TV, and it's hard not to see why. Barry Jenkins, whose Moonlight just won Best Picture, is already slated to adapt Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad as a limited series. Meanwhile, Netflix and Amazon are jumping headlong into film production and distribution. Netflix in particular is prepared to spend huge amounts of money, including $125 million on Martin Scorsese's next picture.
Unfortunately, with the good comes the bad. As Netflix and the like take over, the odds of seeing small-to-medium-budget films on the big screen become increasingly less likely. Amazon has made a decent play for theatrical distribution, mostly to garner a high critical reputation and awards recognition. But at what point do they also start cutting their losses and release their films direct-to-streaming? There's also the other risk to the broader culture, where those medium-budget films become little more than digestible content on Netflix, curated by random algorithms, existing in a state of near-irrelevance next to every other piece of content vying for the public's attention. A mad mess on our televisions, and a constant feed of giant spectacle at the cinema.
That's the reality we're moving toward. Nothing to stop it now. The blockbusters have already taken over March. They'll come for January before we know it, and then it's over. We'll be living in summer all year round.
