Blockbuster summers had a thrilling run
Summer begins on Thursday, June 21, and yet the so-called “summer movie season” is about to come to a practical end, with the Friday release of “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.”
True, there’s a new “Mission: Impossible” film, an “Ant-Man” sequel (did he already die in “Avengers: Infinity War”?) and Jason Statham fighting a giant shark in “The Meg.” But it all feels like a movie equivalent of the end of the party, when all that’s left on the snack table is some celery and some broken Doritos pieces at the bottom of a bowl.
“Black Panther,” likely to be the highest-gross-
ing movie of 2018, came out in February, a month that used to be a cinematic dumping ground. The new “Avengers” movie was released on April 27. Like last year, and the year before that, the most anticipated movies of the year were released while most kids were still in school.
All of which raises a question: Does the summer movie season even exist any more? And if it’s gone, what exactly are we losing?
The answer to the first question: It definitely doesn’t exist.
To understand the second question, let’s first establish just what the season has meant for four-plus decades.
The concept of a summer movie season began with Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” a June 20, 1975, release that gathered momentum throughout the summer. Universal spent nearly $2 million on marketing — an astronomical amount for the time — with a slow-building press tour designed to capitalize on the popularity of Peter Benchley’s book, which was a hit the summer before.
The investment worked, and the “Jaws” template turned into an assembly line.
“Star Wars” was an accidental hit in 1977, reaffirming the summer gold mine, where children out of school might line up five or 10 or 20 times to see an event movie. By 1982, Hollywood had perfected the craft. Between “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” on June 4, 1982, and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” on Aug. 13, 1982, a legitimate half dozen film classics were released.
For the next three decades or so, an unspoken agreement was reached: Hollywood studios would push their marketing abilities to new limits and stretch their budgets beyond comfortable levels. (Visual effects would make a series of seemingly impossible leaps between “Star Wars” in 1977 and “Jurassic Park” in 1993.)
In return, the young, and the young at heart, would invest a large chunk of their finances and personal energy in supporting those films. (I can’t remember a greater feeling of pop-culture-related anticipation in my life than the days before “Return of the Jedi” came out on May 25, 1983.)
Actors and filmmakers defined their careers by summer movies.
The first week of July became known as “Big Willie Weekend,” after six Will Smith films including “Independence Day” and “Men in Black” opened around July 4. The careers of Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, and later Michael Bay, flourished under the arrangement.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that of the six Spielberg films that followed “Jaws,” the only bomb was “1941,” a movie that didn’t open in the summer.
The gradual shift of socalled summer movies away from the actual summer is very noticeable in a newsroom, where I’ve written the Summer Movie Preview cover story for the Chronicle all but one year since 2006. The bigger event movies seem to creep back a little each year — most memorably when the biggest movie of the year, “The Avengers,” was released on May 4, 2014, a week and a half before our story ran. (Not a bad financial move; it grossed more than $1.5 billion worldwide.) By 2017, moviegoers found themselves looking to reserve tickets for “Logan” as early as February for the film’s release date on March 3.
So why did the longtime moneymaking strategy of lining up summer blockbusters fail? Saturation — not just with movies, but with culture.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is responsible for three releases every year, with room for no more than two in the summer. Social media has also wrested the control of marketing back into the hands of the people, allowing a film like “A Quiet Place” or last year’s Oscar-winning “Get Out” to become a blockbuster, with little premeditation.
I have two boys ages 10 and 13, who are both hardwired as geeks like their father. They don’t get anywhere near as excited about films as 13-yearold me did. Even “Black Panther,” the cinematic event of the year so far, was exciting to them because of the culture surrounding it — particularly the Kendrick Lamar soundtrack.
More than anything, though, it’s because they live in a world where there’s enough great entertainment as to be virtually nonstop. Another unforgettable Beyoncé album could drop in the middle of the night. The next great TV show may appear on Netflix as a deliberate surprise.
Among the reasons to feel sorry for the younger generation, “all the good movies and TV and music they get to consume” shouldn’t be high on the list. But if the summer movie season is indeed deceased, there is still something to mourn, beyond the struggle of film journalists trying to figure out the timing of their summer movie previews.
Previous generations were fueled by patience, while young consumers of entertainment these days are treated to constant surprises. With 10 superhero movies scattered throughout 2019 so far, every day is summer.
Still, although access to year-round coolness is a better way to live, the younger generations are going to be missing something as well.
The death of the summer movie season is more than a shifting of dates on the calendar. It takes anticipation out of the equation almost entirely. And in my memories of Jabba the Hutt’s palace in “Return of the Jedi” and Michael J. Fox in his DeLorean from “Back to the Future,” counting the days until summer arrived was at least half the fun.