Please Watch Our Bad January Movies

Hello there! Hollywood here! Are you in the last weekend of winter break and looking for something to catch in theaters? Sure, you could catch Wonka or any of the Oscar contenders that are out, but let’s be honest, nominations aren’t out until the 26th, and are you REALLY going to waste your time on the shortlist?  Of course not! Why don’t you engage in the time-honored tradition of Dumpuary instead?

Have you ever been scrolling through the Netflix backlogs and thought, “is this a moon landing conspiracy movie starring Rupert Grint and Ron Perlman?” We have good news! We’ve been doing this since time immemorial. We like to call it Dumpuary. We look at our movie slates, scroll to the bottom, realize we greenlit a stinker, and release it in January to hide our shame!

Might we interest you in Night Swim? A tradition of Dumpuary is silly horror movies with a single hook. Do you remember Underwater, starring Kristen Stewart? Neither do we, but I bet you can guess what the hook of that movie was! Same for Night Swim. We decided to give Jamie Lee Curtis a career Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, so we banished fellow contender Kerry Condon to the shadow realm of Blumhouse horror. Have you ever reached your hand into a pool drain, and it felt a little spooky? We made a whole movie off of that single coat-hanger of a plot hook.

Horror not your thing? More of a comedy person? Could I sell you on a Mean Girls musical reboot? Despite trailer evidence to the contrary, it is, in fact, a musical! We could release the entirety of it on TikTok like the original to get the kids interested. 

We’ve also got The Beekeeper coming out the same weekend. Why is Jason Statham a beekeeper? Who cares, we might as well call this one Jason Statham 46.

Still not interested, huh? We’ve got a space thriller called I.S.S. in which the Americans and Russians have to fight each other in space after a nuclear war on Earth. We just decided to ignore the geopolitical climate and drop this in January. No one will notice anyway. Does Ava Duvernay’s Origin interest you at all? We’ve been trying to tell you she’s a visionary filmmaker, like six movies in a row, so maybe this one will hit. Look, our trailer even says it “invents a new cinematic language.” That’s hard to believe for a movie releasing in January, but trust us!

That’s all we’ve got before Oscar noms come out and new releases get shoved out of theaters for two weeks. Although I suppose we have a psycho-sexual drama starring Jenna Ortega called Miller’s Girl—indiscriminate barking. Oh, you like that?! Ignore the 90-minute run time and first-time director. Side note: Jenna will also star in The Weeknd’s follow-up to The Idol. She should get a better agent.

We’ll be honest with you: none of these are barnburners. But we’ve had good new movies in January before. Remember M3gan? The kids loved that one. Maybe Mean Girls will be as good as fellow January movie Paddington 2. We can certainly hope so. We promise this year’s Dumpuary will be great. And if it isn’t? We can just blame it on the strikes.