Scorching hot
Good films led to sizzling summer box office.
LAST summer season spawned one apocalyptic headline after another to deliver a singular message: The box office was the worst it had been in over a decade.
Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 kicked off popcorn season in 2017 with a promising start. From there, things quickly took a turn for the worse. Aside from Wonder Woman, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Dunkirk, the movie industry suffered a string of flops across the next four months.
Summer is synonymous with bigbudget action flicks and superhero tentpoles. So why couldn’t last year deliver? Analysts pointed to unwarranted sequels from tired franchises for failing to fill theatres.
Fast forward to 2018, and a number of overperforming blockbusters have propelled the box office up 13.6%, according to comScore.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and Deadpool 2 are just a few titles that proved franchise fatigue doesn’t exist when the sequel in question delivers a quality product.
“To me, Incredibles 2 was the one that was the most impressive,” Imax CEO Greg Foster said.
“It transcended generations. It had this authenticity with this family that we just adore. It made it feel fresh, and that it was worth the wait.”
Audiences have high expectations for popular series, and they aren’t always easy to meet. Just because there’s a built-in fanbase doesn’t mean moviegoers will get excited for new instalments.
Studios learned that the hard way last summer. That was the case, at least, for franchises like Transformers: The Last Knight and Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides that seemed to be running on fumes.
“You have to try 10 times harder to make a sequel live up to the original,” said Jeff Bock, a box office analyst with Exhibitor Relations.
“You need to raise the stakes and do something audiences don’t expect. We didn’t get a lot of that last summer.”
That’s not the say this summer didn’t have its missteps (the failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story raised some alarms).
But as a whole, tentpoles more than carried their weight and outperformed expectations.
Fallen Kingdom generated over US$1bil (RM4.1bil), Ant-Man And The Wasp picked up US$211mil (RM864mil) in North America and US$332mil (RM1.3bil) internationally and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again earned US$345mil (RM1.4bil) so far.
Hollywood can finally breathe a sigh of relief, for now.
“It comes down to content,” Warner Bros president of domestic distribution Jeff Goldstein said.
“There were just good movies that people wanted to see. As an industry, we did a good job of marketing movies to audiences that wanted to see them.”
It wasn’t just follow-ups that raked in the dough. There were a few surprise successes to help bolster the box office.
The Meg proved that moviegoers simply love sharks, Crazy Rich Asians showed that diversity might be able to save the rom-com genre, and Book Club served as a testament to the value of older moviegoers. Meanwhile, indies like Eighth Grade, Sorry To Bother You and RBG became breakout hits of the summer, further bringing diversity and empowerment to the forefront of conversations.
“There was just the right combination at different studios,” Foster said. “The second half of the summer was a heck of a lot better than everyone expected.” – Reuters