With the summer blockbuster period now finished, we head towards a very full-on release schedule. After a long period featuring titles playing for weeks on end, and very few new releases during some weeks – cinemas are suddenly hit with about seven new releases this week alone. The following two weeks will also keep up the pressure with about four new films a week.

These are all the films the studios held back over the summer, clearing the decks before the schools go back. The latter part of September is then propped up with some older releases and event cinema. No doubt some of these films will hit streaming quite quickly as well, meaning release windows are shrinking for some of these latest cinema releases.

This situation raises a couple of familiar questions: Do summer blockbusters play on too many screens for too long (holding back other releases), and why can’t the late-August to September release schedule be a bit more balanced throughout the months? The challenge for film buffs is that one week you are faced with too many choices, and the next, very little, while you never quite know how many weeks a film will play for.

My understanding is that this imbalance is largely driven by the studios rather than the cinemas themselves. However, a major issue is that many venues do not always have the capacity to show every new release in a single week (like this week 21-Aug). Is there a solution? I am not entirely sure, but hopefully, during weeks when cinemas lack the capacity to show all new films, they will roll some over to the following week, instead of letting them disappear entirely.