The March canon: What is it with that month and high-stakes, high-concept love stories?

March is a month of transition. It’s not quite winter anymore and it’s not quite spring yet, but—particularly for people who live in a region of the world that has seasons—March demands that, at some point, you commit to the progression of time and the arrival of spring by turning away from the darkness of winter. Maybe you do it too early and you end up wishing you had a coat on your way to work one morning. Maybe you do it too late and you start sweating through your cozy sweater. Either way, you have to choose to move forward at some point.

Hollywood, intentionally or not, has weirdly reflected this, producing a canon of movies that came out in March and perfectly captured the vibes of March (not to be confused with the Ides Of March, which is a different thing). These are movies defined by choice—a choice to move forward, a choice to live, a choice to love—and it could be argued that sometimes the characters don’t even make the right one. But they’re all about choosing to look away from the darkness and toward the light, much like how those of us in the real world of March must choose to survive the last few weeks of crappy winter to get to pleasant and life-affirming spring.

If that makes simply getting through an average year sound like a heroic effort, that’s because it is, and that’s why we can all relate to Neo, hero of the quintessential March movie The Matrix. Released on March 31, 1999 (and celebrating its 25th anniversary this year), The Matrix is nothing if not a movie about choice, whether it’s choosing to stay in your comfortably manufactured reality versus choosing to stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes, or choosing who you want to be and how you want to be perceived (as seen in the trans interpretation of the film, which is pretty much an undeniable read these days), but mostly—as with many movies in the March canon—it’s about choosing love.

Carrie-Anne Moss’ Trinity has been told a prophecy about her future, that the person she falls in love with will be mankind’s messiah in the war against the machines, a.k.a. The One, but she doesn’t really believe it’s true until the end of the movie when Keanu Reeves’ Neo is seemingly killed. She chooses to accept the prophecy in that moment, confessing to Neo that he can’t die because she loves him, and that means he’s The One. You could even argue that her choice then makes the prophecy true, which is why subsequent Matrix movies are all about the literal Power of Love and the way it gives hope to seemingly hopeless situations.

Speaking of, another film in the March canon is Michel Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, released on March 19, 2004 (celebrating its 20th anniversary). The film is about a woman, Clementine (Kate Winslet), who has reacted to the end of a tumultuous relationship by erasing all memories of her ex, Joel (Jim Carrey), prompting him to do the same with his memories of her.

Thanks to a subplot in which the secrets of the memory-erasing company are exposed, it ends with the two of them coincidentally meeting up for a second time and then discovering the records of their previous relationship. With concrete proof that their relationship did not work before and by all accounts will not work again, they choose to ignore it and give things another shot. Spring may be no better than winter, but that’s the choice they make.

Eternal Sunshine leaves it up to the audience to decide whether or not that’s a good choice or a bad choice, but it’s definitely a hopeful choice (maybe naively so, maybe sweetly so), and one that coincidentally lines it up with The Matrix—a completely unrelated movie that just happened to also come out in March, five years earlier. Except it’s not a coincidence—it’s March. And it doesn’t stop there: Katniss arguably doesn’t really love Peeta when they choose to die together at the end of The Hunger Games (March 23, 2012), but they make the choice nonetheless.

In the March metaphor, they’re choosing winter rather than spring, because it’s the only way to be together, but in choosing to be together they save each other. Spring comes anyway. That’s another aspect of the March canon: These movies are about people who have to make a choice, but time moves on no matter what. Spring happens if you’re ready or not, but these movies are about how you choose to receive it—The Matrix, after all, makes the point that everyone’s big choice doesn’t really matter, it’s all about how you make it. Morpheus says at one point that it’s not about knowing the path, it’s about walking the path.

The list goes on: Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, released March 6, 2009, does feature characters choosing literal romantic love (Nite Owl and Silk Spectre), but it’s a love for the miracle of human existence that convinces Doctor Manhattan to allow Adrian Veidt’s apocalyptic lie to stand when he chooses to kill Rorschach. It’s also about a world in transition, going from one full of superheroes to one without them, which Veidt sees as a positive shift (which is why he kickstarts it by turning the world against Doctor Manhattan).

It’s also not just sci-fi movies, as 10 Things I Hate About You came out on the very same day as The Matrix and is also a movie about transitional periods and making choices about who you want to be and how you want to live your life—what high school movie isn’t about that? It’s not as high-stakes as The Matrix, but it might feel that way for the characters involved, and an adaptation of The Taming Of The Shrew set in a modern high school is at least reasonably high-concept (which makes the story feel bigger than it is). And the characters even choose love at the end, as much as Julia Stiles may say she wishes otherwise in her big poetry reading.

Want more? Bruce Wayne chooses to turn Batman into more of a hero (light) than a weapon of vengeance (darkness) at the end of The Batman (March 4, 2022), which is also an argument you could make about Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice (March 25, 2016). Belle chooses to love The Beast at the end of Beauty And The Beast even though he becomes a boring human (March 17, 2017). Wolverine chooses to leave the next generation of mutants with hope even though he knows they’re inheriting a world that hates them in Logan (March 3, 2017).

So, as we enter the end of yet another March, remember the lesson passed on by Neo and Katniss and more than one Batman: Winter is over and spring is coming no matter what, but it’s up to you to choose how you’ll greet it.