Amid blockbusters, the sands of summer movies are shifting

Does the summer movie season still exist?

It was once an air-conditioned oasis that drew lines around the block of audiences eager for the roller-coaster ride of “Indiana Jones,” the shark bite of “Jaws” and the buzz of a lightsaber. But in a time where the megamovie business is yearround, that once hallowed season of moviegoing — maybe the quintessential big-screen, popcorn-eating experience — no longer means the same thing.

The summer blockbuster didn’t wilt away. It grew too big to content itself just with just May through August. Studios, seeing open real estate elsewhere on the calendar, have in recent years begun spreading out their spectacles through the year. Like a King Kong that broke its chains, the summer movie now lumbers down every avenue. It’s blockbuster gentrification. There’s a Godzilla on every block.

This year has already seen one $1 billion movie (“Beauty and the Beast”) and “Fate of the Furious” isn’t far behind. Others await the cool, vaguely more ‘serious’ breezes of fall, including “Thor: Ragnarok,” ‘’Justice League” and “Blade Runner 2049.” Even “Star Wars,” as if saying goodbye to the kiddie table, has fled summer and taken up residence in December.

Notwithstanding some very anticipated movies, that’s left a summer movie season without the same sunny glow it once had.

“What’s missing this summer is something out of left field that blows people away,” said Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. “We haven’t had that for a few summers, to be honest — that true blockbuster that comes out of nowhere. What we get is pretty known commodities and huge franchises.”

For a great many of the summer’s biggest movies — “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2,” ‘’Alien: Covenant,” the fifth installments in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Transformers” franchises, “Wonder Woman,” ‘’Cars 3,” ‘’Despicable Me 3,” ‘’Spider-Man: Homecoming” — the main objective will be to satisfy fans of the franchises.

Shaking up summer

Others are hoping for something fresher.

Edgar Wright, the British writer-director of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz,” is a battlescarred veteran of that machine, having spent years writing and developing Marvel’s “AntMan” before departing it over creative differences. This summer, he returns with “Baby Driver” (June 28), his “musical car chase movie” about a freshfaced getaway driver who obsessively soundtracks his high-speed chases.

“It ended up being very fortuitous to come out of a heartbreaking experience and jump straight into something I had already written and I really wanted to do and was my dream movie,” Wright said. “Maybe the day after I left the other movie, literally one of the first emails I got from (production company) Working Title just said ‘Baby Driver next?’”

After its enthusiastic reception at SXSW in March, “Baby Driver” was pushed by Sony Pictures from August into the heart of the summer. “It won’t be like anything else that’s out in the cinema at that time,” Wright said. “It’s up against the behemoths like ‘Transformers,’ ‘Despicable Me’ and ‘Spider-man,’ but it’s not like any of those movies.”

Others are trying to reorient the summer movie. Christopher Nolan, who enjoys a rarefied position in Hollywood given his successes, will trot out his World War II tale “Dunkirk,” about the British evacuation in France. Largely shot with IMAX cameras, “Dunkirk” is the kind of grand historical epic that rarely appears in summer, let alone any other time of year.

Some films find reinvention in a shift in perspective. Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” (June 30), adapted from the 1966 Civil War novel by Thomas P. Cullinan, takes a more female view of the story of a Union soldier who takes shelter in a Confederate girls boarding school than the 1971 version starring Clint Eastwood. Kumail Nanjiani’s “The Big Sick” (June 23) is a funny and tender Rom-com, only told with more realism than usual in the genre and a less familiar cultural context. Nanjiani plays a PakistaniAmerican stand-up trying to evade an arranged marriage, and is inspired by Nanjiani’s meeting of his wife and collaborator, Emily Gordon.

New players also are shaking up the summer. Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit” (Aug. 4), about the city’s 1967 riots, will be the first summer film distributed by Megan Ellison’s acclaimed Annapurna Pictures. That, too, is untraditional summer programming, but Bigelow has made a career out of turning complex subjects into heart-pounding cinema. The timing, Bigelow said, has less to do with the summer season than the 50th anniversary of the unrest.

But the most significant new entrant to the season is Netflix, which will be rolling out its most ambitious efforts yet. Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi fantasy “Okja,” with Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, arrives June 28. And with David Michod’s Afghanistan War satire “War Machine,” starring Brad Pitt as a fictionalized Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the streaming service will take a significant step up in scale (it paid $50 million for the film) and star power.

“This is a Netflix film, and there’s something about that that really excites me,” Michod said. “Maybe this isn’t the kind of movie the studios would put into a wide release in this time of year. There’s something about the Netflix revolution that makes me feel: Why not?”

It’s the kind of subject matter and style — a seesawing, absurdist tone inspired by films like “Catch-22” and “M-AS-H,” that today’s studios likely wouldn’t touch. But Michod (“Animal Kingdom,” ‘’The Rover”) said the world — and the summer movie season — “could use more wild and unusual movies.”

“We needed freedom and we needed to be working with people who embraced the risk of the venture,” the Australian director said. “And all of that has certainly proved to be true with our experience with Netflix. Something about making films for traditional, arguably staid theatrical rollouts has steadily crushed risktaking on a grand scale.”

So, no, the summer movie season isn’t the same. But in the shadow of superheroes, a new kind of summer movie — on screens big and small — might be growing.

As I struggle for a diplomatic way to bring up that time when the internet was mean to her, Anne Hathaway graciously intervenes.

“Go ahead, say it,” she said, laughing.

So I press on, citing the relevance of her strangeby-design new movie “Colossal.” A monster appears, the world gawks, and Hathaway’s character is forced to consider strange parallels between the creature and herself (I’m revealing no more here than you can see in the movie poster).

Does it remind her of anything?

“I don’t see how it could not,” she said. “And not just because of my own experience. We’re all going through this (online hostility) thing, figuring it out together. I’ve learned how to deal with it, and it doesn’t bother me that much now. I worry more about someone who’s 13 and getting beat up on social media, and being asked to understand it.”

It was just after she won an Oscar for “Les Miserables” that online Hathaway antipathy became a trending-now hobby for trolls. She read some of it and was blindsided and bit confused —in part because she didn’t recognize the “creature” under attack.

Who knows what gets under a troll’s pajamas, but Hathaway had a quick rise, enviable success, and a too-perfect image informed by her “Princess Diaries” movies. Hathaway, though, has done all kinds of things on screen — she was a great Catwoman, a memorable apprentice to Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” and a human train wreck in “Rachel Getting Married,” a role with similarities to her latest.

In “Colossal” (opening Friday), she’s Gloria, a young woman with a drinking problem who loses her job and her boyfriend (Dan Stevens), goes back home, where she starts waitressing — and drinking — in a bar run by an old friend (Jason Sudeikis). As Gloria upends things in her hometown, a monster does the same to Seoul, Korea, and “Colossal” has far-out fun pondering the coincidence.

For Hathaway, “Colossal” is completely different. “I’m not trying to bite the hand that feeds me. I’ve done very well by Hollywood norms, but you never want to do to too much of any one thing. I sent out a request to my team: If you run across anything weird, can I please read it. I got back the script for ‘Colossal’ with a note on it that said: ‘Well, this is definitely weird.’”

So weird that nobody was putting up money to make it. Writer-director Nacho Vigalondo was — best-case scenario — contemplating a Spanish-language production in Madrid. With Hathaway attached, everything changed (she’s listed as executive producer). Sudeikis and Stevens were hired, an effects budget materialized.

She likes being in a position to make her own breaks. “I’m at this age where, if you are a woman in Hollywood, you are supposed to start getting scared about your career. And I just wanted to go the opposite way,” she said.

‘This was magical’

And so, “Colossal” — a movie that exists outside any known genre. “This one feels so personal to me. It lives in the world of the dark and the silly, and that for me feels so true to a majority of the experiences in my life,” she said. “This was magical.”

She thinks Gloria will resonate with a lot of viewers — her Godzillalike alter-ego aside.

“She has her own set of problems, but she’s also feeling what everybody feels today. There are so many stresses and pressures. Everything’s a problem,” Hathaway said. “Gloria just gets kind of capsized by all that pressure, and tries to kind of right herself. I know I’ve felt that way in my life.”

Hathaway said that, when she was making “Colossal,” she knew there was a chance that it was a movie “that maybe four people would see.” But embracing the unique nature of the material was the whole point.

Since making it, she has been astounded and encouraged by the success of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” which she cites as an example of a movie that wasn’t afraid to go its own way. “It gives you the courage to take off in new ways, at a time (in your career) you are told to fear. I’m not afraid,” she said. “Just really lucky.”

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