'Tis The Season ... for Good Films
Dec. 15, 2006— -- It is as much a rite of the holiday season as gifts and caroling and the yule log: the yearly arrival of … well, you know, the good movies.
Each year, Hollywood holds back many of the films designed to engage the mind and stir the soul until the holiday season. After 11 months of frat house comedies, adrenaline-pumping action pictures, and gore-drenched horror flicks, movies for grown-ups are released around Christmas time. Lots of them and all at once.
This leads audiences to ask where the fa-la-la-la-la have they been hiding?
According to Jill Bernstein, senior editor at Entertainment Weekly, there are reasons for the holiday glut of good stuff.
"Number one, you've got people at home on vacation," she says, "And you want to release a lot of movies to capitalize on all their leisure time and leisure spending."
From Christmas to New Year's Day, many adults are off from work, says Lynda Obst, who has produced movies such as "Sleepless in Seattle" and "How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days."
"Every night is a movie night," Obst says, "And so for us that's critical: that we have every night to go to the movies and not just weekends to go to the movies."
During the holiday movie season -- the stretch of time beginning right before Thanksgiving and ending Jan. 1 -- up to 20 percent of all movie tickets for the year are sold. But when it comes to why so many top-drawing films get released at year's end, the biggest motivation of all lies just around the corner: the Academy Awards.
"The reason that there are so many movies for grown-ups right now is really because of the Oscar race," says Bernstein. "Those are the kinds of movies that win all the awards, and this is the time frame that those movies get released so that they'll stay fresh in voters' minds."
Obst says an Oscar nomination or a win can add tens of millions to the box office earnings of an elite film that might otherwise struggle. She points to last year's "Brokeback Mountain" and 1998's "Shakespeare in Love" as examples.
Related Stories
ABC News Live