Hollywood Abandoned August. But the Movies Didn’t

As someone who loves the cinema — and sometimes even the industry that creates it — I wanted to pause for a moment to celebrate the wonders and possibilities of a month that gets little attention and even less praise.

Let’s raise a glass to August — the most interesting month on the movie calendar.

August exists in the nether regions between the film calendar’s most valuable real estate (May through July) and when the box office turns very serious for Oscar season in the fall.

It still has a foot in summer, so it’s not the scorched-earth real estate of January and February, the eternal dumping ground of the movie calendar — the toxic Superfund ground of studio slates.  

But with the days of summer dwindling, it’s also not when you’d release your giant world-devouring tentpoles.

To put it in L.A. real estate terms: August isn’t Bel-Air or Brentwood. It’s more like Mar Vista or Glendale.

And that relative lack of pressure is exactly what makes August interesting: It’s one of the last places on the calendar where Hollywood can still take a chance.

Historically, August has been a home for the in-betweens — movies that the studios haven’t given up on, but also aren’t their IP monsters either; genres that might be cold at the moment but are deserving of and ready for revival (comedies, action programmers, romances, oddball horror and even, God forbid, stories with non-white leads).

These are the singles and doubles of the movie business — the films that don’t have to save a studio, launch a universe or gross $1 billion lest they be deemed failures. And increasingly, August is one of the few places left for them.

This month, we can barely see the August releases, buried under the twin juggernauts of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. But look underneath them and we have some interesting non-tentpole IPs. Not all of them worked perfectly, but August films are always trying to do something different.  

This August we got:

• Universal’s One Night Only — a rare brave shot at a rom-com with an incredible off-center premise: premarital sex is outlawed except for one night a year.
• Disney/Searchlight’s Super Troopers 3 — the Broken Lizard phenom won’t be stopped!
• Warner Bros.’ The End of Oak Street — one of the most idiosyncratic takes on a studio tentpole in recent times, from director David Robert Mitchell and producer J.J. Abrams.
• Angel Studios’ The Brink of War — a docudrama about Reagan and Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit.
• Lionsgate’s Mutiny — a nuts-and-bolts Jason Statham actioner. (Jason Statham might well, in fact, wear the crown of Mr. August — see also: The Meg franchise and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw).
• Universal/Focus’ Finding Emily — ANOTHER rom-com! Set on a college campus no less!
• Ketchup Entertainment’s Coyote vs. Acme — The cause célèbre after Warner Bros. and David Zaslav sold it off finally meets the public.
• Disney/Fox’s The Dog Stars — Ridley Scott post-apocalypse virus actioner with Jacob Elordi.

Frankly, I want to see every one of those films — and that’s not even counting the multiple indie titles making waves this month, including Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Mubi), Matt Johnson’s Tony (A24) and the Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat stoner buddy comedy The Wrong Girls (Neon).

That is more movies that I really want to see than in the previous three months of tentpole-land combined.  

In terms of pure box office, we already know some of these movies didn’t work. One Night Only missed; The End of Oak Street failed to connect in a major way despite strong reviews. But this year is also a bit of a wild card in the shadow of OdysSpidey (I’m still going to make this portmanteau happen).

The point isn’t that every August gamble pays off. It’s that studios and indies are still rolling the dice — in genres, budgets and concepts that increasingly struggle to find oxygen anywhere else on the calendar.

So why is August even considered this netherworld?