WORST. SUMMER. EVER. By now you’ve heard that refrain applied to the 2016 blockbuster season. Normally, we’re highly skeptical of any claims that suggest that the times we’re living in right this second are somehow unprecedented. The idea that Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before almost always proves false in the longer term, because the wheel turns, old wounds heal and new much more painful ones are opened up. And it’s a phrase that has been, within our collective memory of just the last decade or so, widely applied to 2013, to 2010, 2009 and 2007. But even manfully resisting the pull of recency and trying our best to dose ourselves with as much perspective as possible, we have to agree that 2016 at least feels particularly grim in terms of its blockbusters. So let’s strap on our calculators, open up roughly 47 tabs in Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, IMDB, the various trades and Rotten Tomatoes to investigate the statement from every conceivable angle.
“Ever”
The very idea of the summer season is a lot younger than the movies — so don’t fear I’ll be dredging up the notorious example of when saucy Mabel Normand vehicle “Mickey” shocked onlookers by juicing its August release date to become the highest-grossing film of 1919. Blockbuster culture was born in June 1975 with “Jaws” and even so took a while to catch on, bolstered by the May ’77 release of “Star Wars.” But it wasn’t really until the early ’80s that it became a codified principle that if you had a film that you were hopeful a huge number of people would see, you’d be a sap not to release it between May and August. So for the purposes of our discussion here, “ever” refers to “since 1980.”
So there are other possible contenders for the title dating back three and half decades. It’s hard to find one in the ’80s itself, though, because there’s a major nostalgia factor at work that makes it seem like even pretty crappy movies are fond childhood masterpieces (don’t faint, but “The Goonies“). Also while the blockbuster flourished and more or less defined 1980s cinema, the sequel, remake, reboot and expanded universe culture that we now live in, that simultaneously freights so many big releases with untenable expectations and then makes them seem tediously familiar once they arrive, was not yet in place. But for argument’s sake, let’s look at 1985: yes, there were unassailable masterpieces like “Back to the Future,” “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” and fine, whatever, “The Goonies” that year, but that was also the year of nadir Bond “A View to A Kill,” “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” “Teen Wolf,” “Return to Oz,” “Red Sonja,” and “Gymkata.”
Or to skip to the 1990s, what about the notorious summer of ’97 which saw the release of “The Lost World,” “Batman and Robin,” “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” “Nothing to Lose“ and “GI Jane“? How offset were those turkeys by the fact that “Air Force One,” “Face/Off“ and “Men in Black” also numbered among the year’s biggest hits? My personal pre-2016 vote may go to summer 2001, when we kicked off the new millennium with a roster of shame that included “The Mummy Returns,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Rush Hour 2,” “Jurassic Park III,“ Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes,” “American Pie 2,” “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” “Dr. Dolittle 2,” “America’s Sweethearts,” “Cats & Dogs,” “Scary Movie 2,” “The Score,” “Swordfish,” “Evolution,” “The Animal,” “Rat Race,” and ”Osmosis Jones,” with only the paltry likes of “Shrek,” “Legally Blonde“ and “A.I.” to halfheartedly cheer for.
Or what about 2013, for which you can still find legions of online op-eds discussing how the sky was falling and it was the Worst Summer Ever despite (or to some, because of) “Iron Man 3,” “World War Z” and “Pacific Rim“: consider “Man of Steel,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “Grown Ups 2,” “The Wolverine,” “Now You See Me,” “Monsters University,” “Elysium,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” “White House Down,” and “Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters” and you can see maybe people had a point.
All of which might seem to be a plea for sanity and perspective and a call to count whatever blessings summer 2016 has given us, like “Captain America: Civil War,” “Star Trek Beyond” and “The Conjuring 2.” But no matter how sunny a spin we try to put on things, the specter of the likes of “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” “The Angry Birds Movie,” “X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows,” “Warcraft,” “Independence Day: Resurgence,” “Now You See Me 2,” “Legend of Tarzan“ and now “Suicide Squad“ looms large.
I can’t believe these guys aren’t friends IRL
“Summer”
Box Office Mojo defines the season as running from the first weekend in May to Labor Day, which this year is September 5th, meaning that if you were hoping Clint Eastwood’s “Sully” would save the summer you’re fresh out of luck as it opens September 9th. And of course, we’re not talking about indies that are released during this period as counter-programming to: we’re including only wide-release first-run studio films within the remit. Those films have traditionally been so associated with the season that they’re what we refer to when we talk about “summer movies,” so much so that the term has almost become a genre.
And for the most part that’s still the best definition we have of the summer season, though as David Ehrlich persuasively argued in The Dissolve in 2013, the last “worst summer ever,” there are various factors that have complicated the rule. It certainly seems to give a false perspective on the year 2011, for example, that the summer movie tally might exclude “Fast Five” and its $210m domestic haul, because it was released on April 29th. Since then, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” made a quarter of a billion releasing in the first week of April, and “The Lego Movie” a “summer film” by any non-literal definition, made the same amount by releasing in February 2014. Couple that with the practice whereby enormous surefire hits like “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the “Lord of the Rings” movies and the penultimate ‘Harry Potter‘ film can open during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season (which will also be the fate of this year’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” “Assassin’s Creed,” “Passengers,” “Dr. Strange,” “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” and more) and it means that the proportion of a year’s total box office represented by the summer season is getting smaller.
You can either choose to interpret that the way Kyle Buchanan, writing for Slate in 2014 did and say that the whole year is now blockbuster season, or you can suggest that this greater flexibility may contribute to a feeling of paucity in the previously hit-laden summer months. Would we think better of summer 2016, for example, had certified hit “Deadpool” (also one of the best reviewed blockbusters of the year, incidentally with a current “fresh” 84%) been released in May rather than February? In fact so far this year, 4 of the top 6 films by gross — “Deadpool,” “Zootopia,” “The Jungle Book“ and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” all of which feel like they’re part of the summer movie “genre” — were not released in summer at all.