The fourth-quarter awards season rush is a long, exhausting, and stressful time for movie studios, both small and large. If it's not an endless string of ceremonies and red carpets, it's the constant behind-closed-doors politicking that executives must do in order to keep their prestige films at the top of voters' and moviegoers' minds alike. Come January, it's time for a break.
The result: Hollywood's notoriously weak Q1 yearly output. Kicking off right after New Year's Day and extending throughout the end of March, the movie industry's wave of first-quarter releases is traditionally crappy—after all, January and February are prime time for working those Oscar contenders as diligently as possible before the Academy Awards get underway. The last thing any highbrow executive wants to do is worry about promoting another film as strong as, say, Argo. It's easier to just toss A Haunted House into multiplexes and never look back.
True to form, 2013's first three months saw several crappy movies open theatrically. Critics were given plenty of fodder to write hilariously scathing reviews, and audience members were left wishing they would've just beaten their heads in with baseball bats. What's that, though? You're a completest who tries to see as many bad movies as you can? Forget that masochistic hobby and simply click through the following collection of GIFs from this year's worst movies (so far). No human being should ever have to suffer through the entirety of Movie 43.
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Written by Tara Aquino (@t_akino), Matt Barone (@MBarone), and Ross Scarano (@RossScarano).