To the dedicated moviegoer, it might feel — perhaps it should feel — as if the studios have given up on January. Because they have. But we don’t have to follow suit. A new year offers new hope and fresh thinking.

There has to be a better way.

A question of teleology: Is the January cinematic boneyard a naturally occurring phenomenon or has it been developed by the studios, consciously or not, as part of the ebb and flow of their larger annual release patterns? During the great movie-factory era of the first half of the 20th century, when the studios owned the theaters in which they projected their wares, spring, summer and the post-Labor Day holiday season were, as now, the times when big movies were released.

Yet January was still in the mix. Silent-era Charlie Chaplin hits like “The Kid” (1921) and “The Circus” (1928), the Garbo/John Gilbert melodrama “Flesh and the Devil” (1927) and Josef von Sternberg’s “Last Command” (1928) all came out during the first month of the year. The 1940s saw such gold-plated January classics as Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels” (1942), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943) and John Huston’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948). In 1940 alone, John Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath,” Howard Hawks’s “His Girl Friday” and Ernst Lubitsch’s “Shop Around the Corner” joined forces for what deserves to be enshrined as the Greatest January of All Time.

After that, not so much. With the breakdown of the studio system in the 1950s, release patterns began to clump more formally around big weekends, warmer weather and national holidays. Of the films on the Internet Movie Database’s “Top 250” list — a useful if occasionally insane ranking voted by the Web site’s registered members — only two post-1948 movies appear to have been released in January. They are “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964) and — the grand exception to the January Movies Will Never Amount to Anything rule — “The Silence of the Lambs,” which opened in New York on Jan. 30, 1991, and went on to sweep the Academy Awards.

Still, Jan. 30? That’s February in all but name. And it’s worth noting that the rest of America didn’t get to see “Silence” until two weeks later. A proper January movie gets released to thousands of theaters at once — a studio’s way of gritting its teeth and ripping off the Band-Aid.

Anyway, “The Silence of the Lambs” was an aberration, because by 1991 the modern film industry’s release calendar was taking its modern shape. The studios had already discovered the summer blockbuster with “Jaws” in 1975 and “Star Wars” in 1977, and the late 1980s and early 1990s produced the coming of indie-film hardball players like Harvey Weinstein and Merchant-Ivory, guarantors of Oscar quality whose films staked out the available corners of the autumn awards race.

While the summer movie season begins earlier every year, all other aspects are now written in stone. Memorial Day through late July is for explosions, flying spandex men and C.G.I. critters. Labor Day through the end of the year offers films that are good for you. February through April is what the studios make of it. August is death by ennui. And January is suicide.