January has long been considered a dumping ground for blockbusters – which means the field is open for Oscar hopefuls to make cash…
There’s a curious spot of perceived wisdom in box office circles that January is a bit of a theatrical dumping ground. When Bong Joon-ho’s follow up to the Oscar-winning Parasite, Mickey-17, was originally pushed to an early-year release, it was taken as a cause for concern. When it was duly shifted (again) to its current date in March, it was widely seen as a vote of confidence from Warner Bros.
From a UK perspective, this seems odd, because January is when all the good films come out. After years of pushing all their star-stuffed dramas to the end of the US release schedule (how else can voters remember they exist?), any original story with a half-decent marketing budget now makes its way into the UK while we’re sweeping the last of the Christmas tree needles under the rug. If you’ve been crying out for mid-budget, grown-up filmy films in the UK, January is usually the month for you.
2025 is no different. The new year kicked off with Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, weepy romantic drama We Live In Time, and the critically acclaimed Nickel Boys. This week, we’re getting our sticky British paws on Jesse Eisenberg’s Holocaust tourism drama A Real Pain, Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson’s knotty office erotica Babygirl, and Angelina Jolie’s exceptional turn in opera biopic Maria. Later in the month, Timothee Chalamet goes electric in Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, 215-minute drama The Brutalist is making architecture (and intervals) cool again, and Saturday Night is taking a bow, disappointingly, on a Friday. Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is out, too, but he’s so cricket box-kickingly British we’re giving him a whole sentence of his own.
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In less awards-friendly fare, we’ve got Universal monster-mash Wolf Man, British swashbuckling blockbuster William Tell, and Stephen Soderbergh’s minimalist haunted house movie, Presence. If anything, we’re currently suffering from too much choice – assuming most cinema fans would struggle to get down to their local Picturehouse upwards of three times a week (if they can even find a cinema screening all of the above alongside festive holdovers Mufasa: The Lion King and Sonic The Hedgehog 3).
Considering plenty of people spend the rest of the year struggling to find adult dramas catering to their tastes, the all-eggs-in-one approach can feel a little frustrating. Part of the reason every year seems to end with a chorus bemoaning the state of the big screen must be because most of the studios’ non-blockbuster stuff has barely begun limited releases Stateside, let alone made it to the rest of the world. When a dozen of what awards bodies will dub the ‘best films of the year’ all arrive within a few weeks of each other, it feels like we’re being given an entire annum’s worth of cinema crammed into the space of a month or two.
Even in the winter scrum, plenty of Oscar favourites still manage to turn a profit. In last year’s race, frontrunners The Zone Of Interest, Poor Things and American Fiction easily doubled their production budgets despite being released within two weeks of each other in the US – and with summer blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer taking up plenty of the awards oxygen.
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It’s telling, then, that the only kind of film missing from most January release windows is a bloody expensive one. The priciest films out in the UK this month, by some margin, are James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown ($50m-$70m) and Nosferatu ($50m). At least three (A Real Pain, The Brutalist and Wolf Man) don’t even stretch into two-figures (Presence and Hard Truths haven’t released their respective budgets, but any price higher than a second-hand Skoda Yeti would be a shock for either).
All of which puts January in the UK (and, as December titles transition to wide releases, the US) in a strange place, movie wise. Plenty of films are coming out; plenty of people are going to the cinema; plenty of films are making a profit. But the films in question are mid-budget thrillers, dramas and full of sexy people having sex. It’s almost like how cinema used to be… Maybe the rest of the year has something to learn from January after all…
