January Isn’t the Garbage Dump for Movies That It Once Was

The month of January is synonymous with being an unfettered dumping ground for movie studios. If there’s something that’s deemed uncommercial, you give it a January release, when everyone is back in school and the office after the long holiday season. More often than not, the new releases taking up theater space are low-grade horror movies by Blumhouse or junky action movies by Lionsgate, often starring Gerard Butler or Jason Statham. However, everything we once knew about the industry and its trends has been upended in the last five years. Suddenly, as seen with last year’s promising slate, including Presence and One of Them Days, and a 2026 lineup featuring 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Dead Man’s Wire, and Send Help, January can be an exciting time at the multiplexes. Most of all, considering that most people are catching up on the awards season holdovers from the year prior, January is one of the most prestigious months we have.

2025 and 2026 Have Upended the Usual January Movie Dumps

Still, no matter how you spin it, the first month of the year will always be ripe with disposable genre programmers that leave little impact upon release. Recent January dumps like Flight Risk, Wolf Man, Night Swim, Plane, and this month’s Primatefit the bill for the usual schlock this time of year, and they won’t be going away. Despite the low-rate quality of most of these movies, it wouldn’t feel right if the onslaught of prestige films and tentpole blockbusters during Christmas weren’t followed by these palate cleansers.

On the surface, The Bone Temple and Send Help, two studio horror-thriller films, are your basic January dumps, and the same could be said for 2025’s ghost story, Presence. However, modern Januaries have experienced a finer class of genre pictures. The Bone Temple is a sequel to the acclaimed and daring zombie survival horror legacy sequel 28 Years Later and directed by Nia DaCosta, a promising filmmaker who can unleash her unhindered creativity now freed from the clutches of the MCU. Send Help is a glorious return to horror by one of the genre’s masters, Sam Raimi, a director who is an event unto himself for most cinephiles. At long last, the legendary Gus Van Sant is finally making a feature film with Dead Man’s Wire. Despite operating in familiar territory, these movies offer plenty of mystery thanks to their elusive marketing.

Previous Januaries have shattered our preconceived notion of a January dumping ground. Anyone who saw One of Them Days, a delightful throwback studio comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA, knew that this month is nothing to scoff at, as the movie is the exact kind of star-making, mid-budget original comedy that audiences clamor for. Presence looked like a run-of-the-mill haunted house mystery, but with Steven Soderbergh behind the camera, conventions should be thrown out the window. Soderbergh used the tropes of January horror dumps to explore the dynamics of a broken family, repressed angst, and familial trauma.

January Is a Time to Catch Up on Prestige Films

Something that gets lost in our perception of January: not everyone lives in New York and Los Angeles. For those not in coastal America, many of the major awards players expand at the turn of the year. While The Secret Agent, No Other Choice, The Testament of Ann Lee, and other prestigious films lurking in the Oscar race are 2025 releases, everyday audiences are seeing these in 2026. The gradual process of catching up on these acclaimed films by great directors is an exciting refresh after the chaos of the holiday season ceases, where seemingly every noteworthy movie is released within a 10-day span. Between other December holdovers like Avatar: Fire and Ash and Marty Supreme continuing to hold their ground, January is consistently one of the most diverse moviegoing months on the calendar.

January is not a cinematic junkyard, but rather, a period of fresh starts and new beginnings. Skeptical viewers can fit a spot in their New Year’s Resolutions to open their hearts to The Bone Temple or Send Help. Despite being a favorite of the die-hard cinephile, any film by Park Chan-wookis a rollicking piece of entertainment, and a neophyte of foreign cinema could do a lot worse than checking out a pitch-black comedy/thriller in No Other Choice. Audiences are proven to be susceptible to anything, evidenced by initial underperformers like The Greatest Showman and Anyone but You dominating the box office in January following poor openings in December. Gerard Butler and Blumhouse have a permanent residence in the January calendar, but no calendar is more wide open than the first month of the year.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now playing in theaters.