Winter Movies Suck While Oscar Season is Overcrowded

Why Hollywood needs to improve their predictable release schedule.

Excited about a new movie in production? If its release is in January or February, you might want to lower your expectations.

Hollywood — and its audience — have become accustomed to a pattern: fall is for Oscar hopefuls, summer is for blockbusters, and winter — well, winter is the dumping ground for everything else.

Has there always been this predictable tri-season schedule? And is there actually a correlation between quality and the time of the year a movie is released?

Using proprietary data from Taste, we collected standardized user ratings from movies released in the past 30 years. We then graphed these user ratings by the season (Off-Season, Summer, Oscar) from 1986 to 2015.

Here’s our results:

Here’s what we found: