Cry August and let slip the dogs of summer’s film lineup

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Oh August, season of misses and messy fruitlessness, popularly known in filmdom as a dumping ground for the dogs of summer, second only to a January release as a perceived kiss of doom. And it's true, many Hollywood hopes do limp out to die in the wan August sun (I'm looking at you, Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Fantastic Four).

But a closer look reveals something more complicated than that perception. August is actually a mirror of the public's taste and Hollywood's ever-changing strategies to figure out what that is. The current plan, to throw everything at August and see what sticks, confirms that the movie business – that is, the old-school business of getting bums into theatre seats – is in a flail.

Over at Universal, where the champagne never stops popping, it's the best summer ever: Trainwreck, $103-million (U.S.); Pitch Perfect 2, $184-million; Minions, $321-million; Furious 7, $351-million; Jurassic World, $640-million. Yet elsewhere it's a disaster: production and marketing budgets spiralling out of control, big-ticket films crashing.

August is allegedly a good month to lure the older demo who avoid the clamour of July, and indeed, when I went to see Ricki and the Flash (Meryl Streep as an aging rocker) at a Monday matinee, and threw open the doors to a steeply raked cinema, I was greeted with a sea of grey heads. Yet, that film has stalled at $21-million, a low point in the Streep canon. Other fare pitched at adults – the excellent The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the charming character study Mistress America – haven't cracked the $1-million mark. Screenwriter William Goldman's old adage about Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything," should be amended with, "especially in August."

Back in the 1980s, things were simpler. Summer movies were for kids. August releases in 1982 – and there were only 10 of them – included Friday the 13th Part III, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Pink Floyd: The Wall and the reissue of Star Wars (now known as Episode IV, but not then). Risky Business was an August release; so were Stand by Me, The Fly and Dirty Dancing. Nineteen-eighty-five nudged up to 22 August releases, a banner list for adolescent boys that included Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Weird Science, Real Genius, Teen Wolf and reissues of both Ghostbusters and Gremlins.

Then in August, 1989, a small change happened: Ron Howard's Parenthood made $100-million, and a little indie called sex, lies and videotape, which had won both the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival and the Palme d'Or in Cannes, came out and wowed city folk. It didn't make a ton of money, about $25-million, but it established August as indie-friendly. Plus, it provided the perfect amount of time for studio marketing departments to work out the release plans for their Sundance acquisitions.

That trend still lives – to a degree: This August, the aforementioned The Diary of a Teenage Girl made its way from Sundance to cinemas. One Sundance doc, however, demonstrated the new world order: What Happened, Miss Simone? is out on Netflix. Theatrical grosses, once the be-all and end-all, can now be the smallest slice of a film's success.

But getting back to August. The game changed again, slightly, in 1992: Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven came out, eventually racking up $101-million, nine Oscar nominations and four wins, including best picture (only the third western to have been so honoured). It proved that August could also be serious, and that Oscar bait could stay fresh through the fall. Twenty-four other films were released the same month, including the thriller Single White Female and the comedy Honeymoon in Vegas, tricks that weren't just for kids. The Fugitive, which came out a year later and made $184-million, confirmed it: For the right picture, August was a prime window, one last blast of summer fun, capable of luring back-to-school shoppers out of Wal-Mart and into the movies.

Suddenly, August had a little something for everyone. Releases for that month throughout the 1990s include violent action (Natural Born Killers), romantic comedy (Tin Cup), video games (Mortal Kombat) and winsome Brits (The Full Monty). The numbers of August releases crept steadily upward, too, from 21 in 1990 to 32 in 1999, when The Sixth Sense made a smashing $293-million.

Instead of suffering a steep drop after opening (films typically go down by 10 to 40 per cent in their second weekend), in the 2000s, several August films actually went up at the box office: Rush Hour 2, Talladega Nights, The Bourne Ultimatum. August was a good home for raunchy comedy (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, Tropic Thunder, Pineapple Express). It was also good for horror (Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator), for girls (the Step Up and Princess Diaries franchises), for indies (American Splendor, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and for Oscar (Inglourious Basterds, Julie & Julia, The Help). Snakes on a Plane came out in August, as did Guardians of the Galaxy, the No. 3 movie of 2014, which grossed $333-million.

Obviously, August movies can still break out. But the crowd is so much bigger now: 41 releases in 2002. Fifty in 2006, 65 in 2007, 67 in 2012. This summer, the Aug. 14 weekend alone saw 22 wide and limited releases, everything from the current box-office champ, Straight Outta Compton, to the tiny indie People Places Things, which came out simultaneously via video on demand. The world is bigger, too – at least half of Hollywood's grosses are outside North America. And consider the Indian martial-arts film Brothers … Blood Against Blood: Released in time for Indian Independence Day (Aug. 15), it may have opened on just a few screens in North America, but opened on 3,500 in its home country. August is the entire movie biz in microcosm, with all its struggles and confusions distilled into one hazy, crazy month.

And even a good August runs out of steam by the end. This year it's particularly cruel, because a quirk of the calendar gives us five weekends for the month instead of four. So, here on the 28th, Hollywood has thrown up its hands, chucking out willy-nilly the films We Are Your Friends, a Zac Efron spree; War Room, a Christian film whose tagline is "Prayer Is a Powerful Weapon" (it doesn't open in Canada); and No Escape, a thriller that pits Owen Wilson against a Southeast Asian coup. The latter should not be confused with No Way Out, the political thriller that launched Kevin Costner's career back on Aug. 14, 1987. It's unlikely this crop will hang around to see September.