On Jan. 16, some 7,000 entertainment industry professionals and journalists will converge on Park City, Utah, hoping for a miracle. Distributors will push past exhibitors who will hustle past programmers, agents and critics, all of whom will be sifting through 117 features and 66 shorts at the Sundance Film Festival, looking for the next big thing: for the new Jennifer Lawrence (class of 2010 with “Winter’s Bone”) or for another “Beasts of the Southern Wild,""Fruitvale Station” or “Upstream Color,” three of the most talked-about titles from recent festivals. It will be exciting, exhausting and at times exasperating to be in the thick of such coordinated madness.

But I have a little favor to ask of the people cutting the checks: Stop buying so many movies. Or at least take a moment and consider whether flooding theaters with titles is good for movies and moviegoers alike. Because no matter how exciting Sundance will be this year, no matter how aesthetically electrifying, innovative and entertaining the selections, it’s hard to see how American independent cinema can sustain itself if it continues to focus on consumption rather than curation. There are, bluntly, too many lackluster, forgettable and just plain bad movies pouring into theaters, distracting the entertainment media and, more important, overwhelming the audience. Dumping “product” into theaters week after week damages an already fragile cinematic ecosystem.

Late last year, my colleague A. O. Scott ran some numbers and discovered, to our alarm, that nearly 900 film reviews ran in The New York Times in 2013, about 75 more than the year before. For various reasons — including the market-driven legitimization conferred by outlets like The Times, which tries to review every new release — more movies open in New York than almost anywhere else in the country. The critical consensus is that 2013 was a good year for movies, but that’s only true if you ignore a lot of the junky titles, like “Iron Man 3,” that dominate the top of the box office and the many more that scrape the bottom, cycling in and out of theaters in a week or two before heading to video-on-demand oblivion.

Ed Arentz, managing director of Music Box Films, one of the best independent distributors in the business, emailed me recently and ventured that the majority of the 900 titles we reviewed were released simply to fulfill a contractual agreement that they appear in theaters first before moving on to the more likely source of revenue: on-demand platforms like cable, iTunes, Netflix and Amazon. “These are films that have fallen short (often well short),” Mr. Arentz continued, “of the normal criteria for a theatrical release and usually must secure their engagements by renting screens rather than the normal exhibitor expectation of sharing in actual ticket sales. I would like to imagine that cable on-demand viewers will eventually wise up, see through this marketing ploy and this practice will fade away.”