Winter 2017

HOLLYWOOD’S
BACKLOADING PROBLEM

By Paul Preston - The Movie Guys

Backloading. You rarely hear this word used. Mostly, you hear about frontloading, but backloading is exactly what Hollywood is doing with its most promising movies, and I don’t think the process is helping the average viewer.

Let me set the stage. Twenty-five years ago, the Best Picture winner, The Silence of the Lambs, came out in February. Since then, a movie released before summer hasn’t gone on to win Best Picture. Here are some Best Picture winners since 1992 and their release months.

Summer:

May – Gladiator, Crash, Braveheart
June – The Hurt Locker
July – Forrest Gump
August – Unforgiven
September – American Beauty

And an over-crowded Fall/Winter:

October – The Departed, Argo, Birdman
November – No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, The Artist, Spotlight, 12 Years a Slave, The English Patient
December – A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, The Lord of the Rings, Return of the King, Million Dollar Baby, Shakespeare in Love, Titanic, Schindler’s List
January – The Revenant
What’s happening is that the studios that hope to gain award recognition are counting on the short attention spans of voters. Therefore, the best films of the year are getting pushed to the end of the year and closer to voting deadlines. This isn’t a new concept, but there’s an unfortunate side effect to backloading the year with awards contenders. So many movies are being released at the end of the year that there’s no way to keep up with them. It’s become a very unflattering term for movies of such high prestige—a dumping ground.

The last six weeks of 2016 saw the following movies released: La La Land, The Founder, Nocturnal Animals, Miss Sloane, Jackie, Patriots Day, A Monster Calls, Silence, Fences, Hidden Figures, Live By Night, 20th Century Women, Lion, Manchester By the Sea, Loving, Toni Erdmann, and Elle. None of these movies gets the chance to stand out like they would during a less-crowded time of year. Plus, there’s no way you’re going to make it to all of these films, especially when you’re tempted with holiday fare like Office Christmas Party, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Moana.




The majority of these movies is in limited release in December and then goes into wider release in January, pushing them farther away from the awards shows that people are following. This year’s Critic’s Choice Awards took place on December 11th, celebrating the best movies of 2016 well before the year was over! If those awards shows have no desire to appeal to an informed audience, mission accomplished, because by December 11th, I’m sure the majority of awards show viewers hadn’t seen La La Land, Manchester By the Sea, Moonlight or Jackie, four of the night’s big winners. So where’s the connection between the critics and the crowd?

January is already considered a dumping ground for movies with a low-confidence factor that studios fear won’t win in an awards season showdown or don’t have the appeal to make it during the summer movie season, which now starts in March! This is when we usually get a new Underworld movie or something from Jason Statham. Now the award wannabes are crowding this field as well.


So, what’s your point, Paul? Let’s get great movies all year long! Hidden Figures is such a tremendous crowd-pleaser that I’m sure it’d find a crowd in July with the right marketing campaign behind it. I believe the audience looking for that movie would show up, and it’s so likeable, spillover into general audiences would be successful. Plus, spreading it out a little would give moviegoers a chance to see these movies. The studios are shooting themselves in the foot by asking viewers to see 17 movies in a short period of time during an already time-crunched time of year. Will I, the movie critic, see all these films? Hell, yes! But I’m a maniac.

To help Joe Q. Moviegoer, I’m asking Hollywood to calm down with backloading and start…I don’t know…continuously loading the great movies? Is that a word? You know what I mean….

 


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