So here is Notorious, the upcoming, long-awaited, this-thing-better-be-pretty-good Biggie feature film.

You can never dig too much out of a trailer, and this seems more like an initial teaser spot than anything else, so the benefit of the doubt is probably necessary. That said, I’m hoping the movie delves a little deeper than the smooth since days of underoos emphasis this preview takes. Biggie did indeed marry that ish while the rest of us remained merely engaged, but the nature of his death, and the larger implications of the mediated beef that lead to that tragedy, deserves a deeper inquiry.

The one big reason to believe that depth will be missed, however, is that release date. January 16th? No good movies come out in January; January is shit movie season, with rare exception. The Oscar push has ended and half the country is under 18 inches of snow, while every studio is holding off on its crowd-pleasing fare until the late Spring/Early Summer kicks off. January is for table scraps.

And Biggie deserves more than table scraps; he deserves some t-bone steak, cheese eggs and Welch’s grape. Which, in the language of movie release dates, translates into a late November/early December opening weekend. Any Biggie picture should obviously appeal more to the street than it does to A.O. Scott, but is it too much to ask to get a high-quality movie out of this dude’s life?

When you’re the greatest to do the greatest thing ever to be done, you deserve your own Oscar-baiting biopic.