Ranting On...Cinematic Release Dates

Kate Winslet in Labor Day

If you haven’t been able to tell through these posts (and I’m aware that I talk about it literally every chance I can get), I used to live in New York City.  It is my favorite place on earth-I love everything about it, from the theater to the food to the people.  Even the things I hate about it (like how the Bronx smells like garbage after a warm rain) I secretly love.  If heaven exists, I desperately want mine to look like New York.

However, not all of us have the great fortune of living in New York, and when it comes to the Oscars and awards seasons, this matters in regard to what films are available to see.  While I don’t live in New York, Minneapolis/St. Paul is still a very large media and cultural market.  It is the fifteenth largest metropolitan area in the country, and has a plethora of art house and mainstream cinemas.  And yet, every year, because of the release schedules of studios and distributors, I am left a bit forlorn come Oscar season.

Looking at Thursday's Golden Globe nominations, I was struck by two films that showed up on the list: The Wind Rises and Labor Day.  Both films scored important award nominations for the calendar year of 2013 (Best Foreign Film for the former and Best Actress in a Drama for the latter), and yet these films won’t be seen during the calendar year for the vast majority of the United States (I also feel the great pain of people around the world with these releases, but that's a plight for a different post).  Labor Day is scheduled for an art house release on January 31^st and The Wind Rises will be released to the rest of the country on February 21^st.  This, obviously, is ridiculous.  By these dates we will not only have seen whether Kate Winslet and Hayao Miyazaki emerge victorious from the Beverly Hilton, but we’ll also know if they were able to translate their nominations to success at the Oscars.

Put plainly, it is unfair to your average moviegoer, and quite frankly, terrible business, to release these movies after their moments in the sun.  Labor Day, for example, likely won’t do any better this awards season than Winslet’s Globe nomination, so it is idiotic that they don’t have the film ready in theaters to capitalize on her success.  It’s not like this is a tiny film-it’s from an Oscar-nominated director who has had major box office success in the past and stars an Oscar-winning actress (who happened to star in the second most successful film of all-time) and an Oscar-nominated actor who has also shown continued box office success.  Jason Reitman, Kate Winslet, and Josh Brolin are all three selling points to a movie, and most if not all art houses across the country would find room for them.  The same holds true for the critically-beloved Hayao Miyazaki, whose fans are ardent and numerous, and would come out to see his film even in the heat of the Oscar season.

One could make the argument that the studios want to bet on their top contenders during this crucial release time (everyone goes to the movies during the Christmas season), and that’s why you’re seeing American Hustle, 12 Years a Slave, and Saving Mr. Banks in every theater across the country but not these two films.  However, there’s something inherently wrong about not having films that are competing for a 2013 trophy available to the vast majority of the country in 2013.  I’m not saying that you have to release your films in every market in the country (if that were true, we’d have a Best Picture race that excluded Nebraska and Philomena in favor of Bad Grandpa), but the Twin Cities, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas-you should at least be available here, not just in LA and NYC.

On a personal level, this also bugs the crap out of me because I cannot, as a blogger and an awards fanatic, complete my year-end lists at the same time as the rest of you.  While I will probably still release my personal awards (have been making them since I was eleven, and yes I am a nerd) on Oscar nomination eve like usual, I will be bummed that Labor Day and The Wind Rises won’t be amongst those that I consider, and because I’m a true nerd, I won’t amend them later if I’m wowed by Kate Winslet or Miyazaki’s swan song.

Every year this happens though: Coriolanus, We Need to Talk About Kevin, On the Road-these are all films that competed and got some precursor love but couldn’t be seen by the general public.  It’s worth noting that despite positive reviews for members of their casts, none of these films actually translated to Oscar, and I am going to state flatly that I think their fractured release schedule hurt them in this regard.  If people across the country were talking about how terrific Vanessa Redgrave or Tilda Swinton or Garrett Hedlund were, they might have snuck in when Oscar started his countdown (and no one better blame the Academy for not getting through a screener here when no one else in the country is talking about a film-it’s not the Oscars fault if you have major, bankable stars and you cannot get any heat because for some reason you aren’t going wide).

Halle Berry in Frankie and Alice

My favorite example of this phenomenon is Frankie and Alice from a few years back.  The film starred Oscar-winner Halle Berry (a solid box office draw for the past fifteen years or so) and scored a surprise Golden Globe nomination.  While an Oscar nomination for Berry seemed an uphill climb (it was a very strong lineup), the Golden Globe nomination certainly spurred some interest and she’s an important enough actress that art houses likely would have taken the film in most major markets.  However, the film has never been properly released.  According to imdb, it ran in two film festivals and a one-week qualifier in Los Angeles, but exists now in only bootlegged screeners on the internet.  It never made it to even New York, and has never been released on DVD despite the Globe nod and Berry’s stature.  It has FINALLY found a distributor and will go to theaters this April, three years after Berry competed for Best Actress.  This is darn-near unprecedented in terms of awards shows, but it illustrates my point-Berry has no business being nominated for Best Actress in 2010 for a film that 99% of America only had access to for the first time in 2014.  Even if she’s giving a career best performance (and how would we know, since none of us got to see it), she should be competing as Best Actress in 2014, not 2010.

The real sad thing about Labor Day and The Wind Rises being such humbugs is that this has been a notably good year for studios not trying these shenanigans, and the best way to prove that is the strong push to get foreign language film contenders in theaters across the country prior to the Oscar nominations.  The Great Beauty, The Broken Circle Breakdown, The Past, and Wadjda have all been in the Twin Cities market in recent weeks or will be before the Oscar nominations are announced, and though I didn’t catch them all, I’m secretly hoping that they all get nominated or shortlisted for Oscar, because I want to reward their concerted effort to be seen and heard, rather than just hang on a shelf until they maybe get an Oscar nomination.

I’m reluctant to issue an ultimatum about films having to be in multiple markets to be eligible for Oscar, though, because of the potential implications if a very small film couldn’t land in a major market.  A film like Upstream Color, for example, has picked up some nominations at the Gotham and Spirit Awards, but probably didn’t play in a large number of markets due to subject matter and its lack of major stars.  I don’t want to close the Oscars off to small cinema such as this, particularly if it’s worthy (thankfully this is out on DVD and I’ll see it before I finalize my lists).

However, the other films I’ve highlighted have major stars: Kate Winslet, Kristen Stewart, Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, and Halle Berry can all open a movie just fine, and deserve no sort of sympathy.  If offered, Landmark theaters would line up at the opportunity to exhibit their films, and they did/will, but all after their awards heat had flourished.

These are my thoughts, but I’d love yours.  Should the Oscars change their eligibility rules to require films to reach a slightly wider audience?  Should the studios be smart enough to know that people will want to see a nominated film during the awards season and not after it (yes, absolutely)?  And what post-Oscar nomination morning film are you most wishing you could see in the run-up to the ceremony?  Share in the comments!