The Doldrums

This time of year is the doldrums for movie releases. All the big prestige, Oscar pictures were released at the end of the year. January is the time to catch up with all of them. No studio releases anything of real importance in January or February (which is why I avoided the Coen brothers' Hail Caesar; their movies are generally Oscar hopefuls so a release in January made me suspect). This is good, for me at least, because my blog had been taken over by movie reviews. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but perhaps I should do other things with my time :)

March is sort of a doldrum month as well. There will be the occasional "big" movie or quasi-blockbuster released during this month: the first Hunger Games movie was released in March (subsequent installments were moved to November); the Divergent series has claimed March, with the third installment opening this weekend. There's also one-off action films that aren't quite right for the Summer Movie Season.

What I think is strange this year is that the follow-up to Man of Steel, the Zach Snyder-directed Batman v. Superman is being released this weekend. This is just strange. The first installment was released in the summer and was meant to be a big, grand, tentpole-reboot of Superman. It sorta failed. It wasn't entirely bad, but there were a lot of longtime Superman fans who were upset with the ending and how is wasn't true to his character.

I admit that I'm curious about Batman v. Superman. I was probably one of eleven people excited about Ben Affleck as Batman. I just find it odd that it's being released in March. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. I probably am. And I probably will see it this weekend. Correction: Batman v. Superman opens next weekend, not this weekend.