The months of May, June and December stand out as being the points of highest investment. The three highest spikes in the graph are in May 2007, November 2008 and December 2009, respectively for Spider-Man 3 ($258 million), Quantum of Solace ($230 million) and Avatar ($250 million). August  was slow before 2007, before it was considered part of the summer blockbuster season.

Looking at the first quarter, with the exception of Astérix aux jeux Olimpiques in 2008, January held budgets below $70 million. In fact the last time Hollywood launched a January release with greater than a $75 million budget was in 2000 with Fantasia 2000. This February no studio released a major picture. March has seen the most steady rise, reaching $130 million this year with Watchmen. Inversely, April has been falling, perhaps since studios prefer to delay big releases until May.

Based on the extraordinary box office performance during the first quarter of 2009, perhaps studios will overcome their fear and place more blockbusters there in the future.

A January article at CNN.com speculated that this growth in movie attendance was due to a general desire to “escape” from the recession. A more recent article in Variety speculated that the boom was due to more big releases being launched after the Christmas season. I wanted to take a look for myself.

It was easy to find out how much money has been made to date for the current 2009 releases, but it was harder to tally the information for movies that were released in 2008, as well as tracking down the 2009 releases that had already closed out their run. For releases that came out before January 1, I had to substract their 2008 gross from their cumulative gross, and then add that into the pot. I did all this and then ran the same exercise for 2008. Since the information available was incomplete, I decided to limit the analysis to the top 80 grossers for each time period. The results are as follows.

It seems that the greatest growth has come from movies released before January, like Gran Torino, Slumdog Millionaire and Marley & Me. Pre-January releases like these have grossed 20% more during the window between January 1 and March 15 than Pre-January releases did in 2008.

At the same time movies released after January 1, 2009 have outperformed by 7% as compared to the same group in 2008. Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Taken have respectively taken in $138 million and $127 million. Not one movie in 2008 had made $100 by March 15; the biggest grosser at that point last year was Cloverfield, with $80 million. Big budget releases like 10,000 B.C. and Jumper didn’t seem to find their audiences.

Based on these figures it is difficult to say exactly why this growth is occurring. It might be escapism, it might be good movies. In any case it’s good news for Hollywood.