Officially, summer begins on the June 21 solstice and ends on September 22.
At the movie theater, the summer movie season is measured a little differently. “Summer movies” tend to start coming out around Memorial Day, and sometimes even earlier than that. (This year, The Mandalorian and Grogu hit theaters on May 22, but in the weeks prior you could catch The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mortal Kombat II in theaters.) And even though August is clearly the summeriest summer month of all (love that humidity!), studios tend to cut off the flow of big summer titles after the first weekend of August.
After that, multiplexes are too full of films released over the prior couple of months — and families are so focused on gearing up for the start of the school year — for any new product to make much of an impact. Instead, late August is the time when companies quietly dump the movies they have little to no faith in; the ones that have struggled through troubled productions and rounds of reshoots; the ones that got terrible test scores; the ones that a studio unwittingly acquired in a corporate merger.
Sure, you might find a diamond in the rough if you head to the theater at the end of August. But you can’t find the diamond if it ain’t buried among a lot of rough. The 15 titles below are the rough; just a few of the reasons why people think of late August as a cinematic dumping ground.
Infamous Movies Dumped in August
Want to know why people think only bad movies come out at the end of August? Here are 15 examples.
READ MORE: The 10 Worst Movies of the Last 10 Years
10 Great Movies Whose Original Ideas Were Terrible
We’ve all got to start somewhere.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky