Liam Neeson looking chilly in The Grey (2012).

The winter movie season in January and February always feels like a letdown. This is to be expected after the abundance of middle-brow, awards season films that flood the cinemas around Christmas. But there’s another, perhaps more obvious, reason for this. Most of the movies the studios release in January are terrible.

Looking at the past three years of January releases, you begin to see a trend for the month’s releases. The winter movie season is filled with cheap horror movies, shallow romantic comedies and bigger films that obviously displeased the studios and have no box office potential.

In horror, there have been plenty of terrible ones over the past three years. In 2009, viewers were subjected to My Bloody Valentine 3D, The Unborn and The Uninvited. In 2010, there were Daybreakers and Legion, and 2011 had Season of the Witch and The Rite.

However bad these horror films are, they usually make money. My Bloody Valentine 3D made $51 million against a $15 million budget and The Unborn made $42 million against a $16 million budget. They cost almost nothing to make (comparatively speaking) and have an established demographic. This has to be the reason why Hollywood keeps pumping them out in this unlikely season (August and October are the typical horror movie months).

This year already had a cheaply-made, moneymaking horror movie, The Devil Inside, which debuted to an astounding $34 million despite boasting a horrific seven per cent rating on the Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer. When January is populated by mid-range films the studios deem financially risky, it makes economic sense to release inexpensive horror movies that are almost guaranteed to take the top of the box office on the weekend when it’s released and make a profit.

Speaking of those mid-range films, every title that ends up in January can be seen as having gained the studio’s disfavour. That’s not to say that the films were displeasing enough for the studio not to release them (which is something studios do), but enough for the studio to resist an intensive and expensive marketing campaign. Sometimes even the studios know they have a stinker on their hands.

Last year’s The Green Hornet had gone through several iterations and directors before finally securing a release date in the dreaded month of January. Having seen the finished result, it makes sense Columbia Pictures felt last-minute trepidation at releasing a big budget superhero movie starring Seth Rogen and directed by the guy who did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film did end up grossing $98 million, but against its $120 million budget and compared to other superhero films based on established characters, it was a financial disappointment.

The same trepidation goes for Edge of Darkness from 2010. It was the first film in eight years to star Mel Gibson, and even though there had been four years since his DUI arrest and anti-Semitic rant, his star power was still feeling the damage of that outburst. The studio was backing a volatile product, and this was before the Internet went aflutter with the release of his raging telephone calls to his ex-girlfriend. The studio had a middle-brow action film starring an ex-A-lister. The logical decision was to dump it in January where they didn’t have to worry about it.

Romantic comedies operate along the same principles as horror films. They have established demographics, cost relatively little to make and serve as deliberate counter-programming (read: they are geared at female audience members who, generally speaking, won’t show up for the horror and action films). The fact that January is stuffed full of films like Leap Year (2010), New in Town (2009), No Strings Attached (2011) and When in Rome (2010) should then come as no surprise. They have big stars and they make modest profits.

Regarding the current slate of January films, 2012’s releases promise to be much the same as others, with a few wild cards. The Devil Inside covers the inexpensive horror category. One for the Money is another Katherine Heigl vom-com. Man on a Ledge and Red Tails seem to be movies the studios feel uncomfortable about. We even get another Underworld movie with Underworld: Awakening — and no one needed another Underworld movie.

Steven Soderbergh’s female-centred action film Haywire seems to be something of a wild card. The only film that people seem to be genuinely excited for is Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, and not so much because it looks like a good film but because it stars Liam Neeson as a survivor of a plane crash in the Arctic who has to fight off timber wolves by taping broken glass bottles to his knuckles. The chance to see Neeson punch wolves is not to be missed.

A new phenomenon that is seeping into the winter movie season is the 3D re-release. Beauty and the Beast comes out in 3D this Friday, hoping to repeat the success of this past fall’s The Lion King re-release. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is being released in 3D in February and Titanic in April. The presence of 3D re-releases in the winter movie season only goes to support the argument that the weak programming of January is dictated by the studio’s finances, much like everything else.

The only film in recent years tried to be an event movie in January was Cloverfield and that was a modest success and a one-of-a-kind film that not every studio is going to greenlight every year.

For the most part, January will remain a movie-going wasteland dictated by the studios’ financial worries. When cinephiles are busy catching up on awards season contenders and the casual filmgoer is taking a break from going to the movies every weekend to recharge for the bigger fare ready to drop in March, Hollywood isn’t interested in releasing great films, focusing instead on the upcoming summer movie season.

Films released in January aren’t destined to be financial failures, but it will be a cold day in Hollywood before films released in winter are nominated for Oscars or make the year-end box office top 10. Things like that don’t happen. The deeper you dig, the more you realize everything about the movies is dictated by money. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

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