Flaco Jones
Flaco Jones is a former film school grad and current professional A/V nerd. You can follow him @flaco_jones on Twitter.
While fall technically runs until late December, the fall movie season gives way to the holiday movie season as of this week. With all the holiday breaks in these next two months, movie studios are vying for your extra free time and money to spend at the local cineplex. Let's see what they have to offer this year.
After a packed summer movie season, a void in the early fall was to be expected. The fall season isn’t the biggest time of year for geek-centric film, but things do start to ramp up mid-October with some interesting smaller releases. This preview will cover all the way up until the beginning of the holiday movie season in late November when the real heavy hitters start showing up.
The box office has been pretty strong this summer as nearly all the movies highlighted in part 1 ended up as top 10 earners of the season so far. If only I had spotlighted “Neighbors” over “A Million Ways to Die in the West” all nine would have been up there.
With a frontloaded summer like this, is there any money left to support the movies coming out in the second half of the season? Looking at July, you may not think so, but things ramp up big time in August.
It’s time to kick off another summer movie season with Part 1 of our 2014 Summer Movie Preview, highlighting the biggest releases for the months of May and June. If these movies sound familiar it’s because all but two of the nine films previewed here are either sequels or reboots, and a couple are even sequels to reboots!
It’s springtime for movies, and there are some decent offerings this year as a bunch of films look to get a jump on the box office before a hyper-competitive summer season gets underway. There is quite a variety to choose from for the months of March and April so let’s get right into it.
The winter season isn’t usually the most exciting time for movies. The box office is more likely to be dominated by December holdovers like Frozen or The Wolf of Wall Street and other movies pushing for the big awards. That doesn’t mean these winter releases are bad (Dark City, an amazing sci-fi film, was a late February release) it just means the studio may not have had the full confidence to release these movies during the ultra-competitive fall and Christmas seasons. For a lot of these movies, that lack of competition could certainly help get some more viewers.
It's the end of the year, so awards are being handed out and everyone is making their lists of the best of 2013. Well, many of the movies we highlight here on VOG don't make a lot of those lists or award shows, despite being some of the biggest box office hits and keeping the Hollywood machine running smoothly year after year.
Shot mostly inside Disney theme parks without the company’s knowledge or permission, Escape from Tomorrow surprisingly found distribution after debuting to some positive buzz at the Sundance Film Festival. Legally, Disney decided a better approach than litigation would be to not acknowledge the film’s existence at all. So it was released unchallenged via video-on-demand services as well as in limited theaters across the country on October 11th. But is the film good enough to overshadow the amazing story of how it was made?
Fall movie season is upon us and after the summer, it's the second most profitable of the quarterly movie seasons, with the Winter/Spring season far behind in last place. Fall is also the time of year for the big award winning movies to debut, but for this preview, we're focusing mostly on the sci-fi and fantasy genre movies. You know, the movies that do all the big business in the fall. Since we're covering a four-month period, I won't be able to spotlight them all, but I'll try to mention other notable films from various genres each month as well.
It’s August and that means, as far as Hollywood is concerned, the traditional summer season is over. Now they’ll still market these films as summer movies, but all of their 100 million dollar plus budgeted movies were prioritized to release between May and July and these are the leftovers. August doesn’t get the hype the other summer months do but I actually think this month can churn out some original hits.