Why did no studio move their upcoming action films to September 7th after The Gangster Squad split?

Yes yes, last weekend's box office was the worst since after the 9/11 attacks.  Normally cumulative weekend box office doesn't mean a damn thing, but this weekend deserves study as a prime example of missed opportunities.  The actual reasons for this are interesting for two reasons.  A) Just like 9/11, the six degrees-of-separation reason is once again rooted in an act of mass violence.  Had the Aurora shootings not occurred on July 20th or had Warner Bros. shown a token amount of backbone, The Gangster Squad would have been the big opener of the weekend and surely would have delivered a better debut than The Words, which turned out to be the sole truly wide release.  Moreover, the weekend shows us how much we've become accustomed to weekly blockbuster opening weekends each and every frame.  But the real question of last weekend is why didn't any studio bother to move a token major action release onto the September 7th slot.  Yes, I know Lionsgate randomly dumped The Cold Light of Day onto 1,500 screens with next-to-no advertising, but considering the coming storm of major genre fare over just the next three weeks, you have to wonder why a studio, any studio, didn't think to jump into the near-vacant slot and avoid the coming storm.

Weekend Box Office (09-09-12): The Words is top opener in painfully weak weekend.

Maybe The Gangster Squad should have stayed put after all.  Its cowardly desertion of this weekend following the Aurora shootings  (it originally climaxed with a movie theater shootings) left September 4th without a major opener and none of the big action releases over the next month (Looper, End of Watch, Dredd, etc.) stepped up to the plate, leaving a vacuum.  As a result, this was the lowest-grossing weekend in several years (which just proves - it's the movies, stupid!).  The top opener of the weak was The Words, a CBS Films drama starring Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, and Olivia Wilde.  All solid names but none save for Cooper qualifying as box office (Saldana sells in action, but not quiet drama).  The badly reviewed literary plagiarism vehicle both seems like the kind of character-driven drama we claim to want more of as well as the kind of thing (especially due to the reviews) that will play just fine on DVD in three months.  So its $5 million opening weekend is unfortunate, if not a surprise.  The film cost just $6 million and was an acquisition, so CBS's financial damages are limited to marketing and distribution.

John Gosling previews the week's new releases (09-07-12).

A relatively quiet weekend with just two major releases, only one of which is out to a substantial number of screens.The Words was written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal and follows a young author (Rory) desperately trying to come up with a story. When his latest effort is rejected he happens across an old manuscript in a house in which he is staying with his partner. Finding himself blown away by how good the story is, he sets to work re-typing it, with a view to passing it off as his own. Thanks to 'his' new book, Rory finds himself the sensation of the publishing world and reaps all the rewards that come with it. But when a man connected with the original manuscript comes into his life, the author soon discovers the high price he will have to pay for stealing another's story. The Words marks the directorial debut of Klugman and Sternthal, who received advice on the script from the Sundance Writer's Lab. With funding in place they set to work on casting, with Bradley Cooper taking the lead role of Rory, Zoe Saldana as his wife Dora and Jeremy Irons as the stranger with the potential to expose Rory's deceit. Other members of the cast included J.K Simmons, Dennis Quaid and Oliva Wilde, the last two acting as a framing device for the picture - Wilde interviewing Quaid's character who has himself written a book relating to the events that unfold as the main body of the film.