Summer box office 2023: what were the big hits and misses?

While Hollywood suffered its fair share of furrowed brows this season, the end result is looking like a win. If all goes to plan by the end of the week, then this summer will see the box office reach the magic $4bn mark, making it the biggest summer since the pre-pandemic era.

It’s all going to be perilously down to the wire though and with a number of major films losing a major amount of money, there are still some vital cautionary lessons to be learned.

It’s a Barbie world

Not even Fortune Teller Barbie could have foreseen the costumeinciting, record-breaking, billion-dollarmaking success of this summer’s liveaction Barbie movie, not just the biggest film of the season but likely to become the biggest film of the year.

Mattel’s robust sales numbers (last year it still made more than $1.4bn from Barbie products) and an inescapably effective marketing campaign suggested big things, but Greta Gerwig’s well-reviewed semi-satire, headlined by Margot Robbie, outdid every expectation and then some, the rare blockbuster that turned into a genuine phenomenon. To date, it’s the biggest film ever from a female director, the biggest film ever from Warner Bros, and with $1.2bn and counting (unlike so many summer hits, it has legs), it’s set to enter the top 10 biggest films of all time. It was the kind of event that the industry had been craving, dragging millions off the couches they had become so comfortable on (a study showed that around a quarter of all Barbiegoers hadn’t been to a cinema since before the pandemic) and proving that the theatrical experience can still be big business.

Inevitably, it’s led to a doubling down by Mattel Studios, confirming plans for films based on everything from Polly Pocket (with Lena Dunham at the helm) to Barney the Dinosaur (starring Daniel Kaluuya) to Uno. But while its monster box office was undoubtedly tied to a long-running, wide-reaching brand (the year’s only other billion-dollar hit is the simi