THB #391: Summer Movie Mythmaking

In Oppenheimer, when Oppy has his first Quantum Mechanics class with just one student, he explains that 2 things that seem disconnected are happening at once… which is impossible… except that it is possible.

This is worth considering when thinking about box office analysis. In this summer’s case, it is true that Barbie and Oppenheimer both significantly outperformed expectations AND created the phenomenon of BarbieHeimer AND didn’t change anything significantly about the movie business.

The summer’s over. Worked out better than expected… after it was more disappointing than expected. Welcome to almost every summer in memory.

11, 17, 14, 12, 15, 11, 13, 11, 9, 13

What are these numbers? The number of $100m domestic grossers in the last 10 summers (not including the COVID summers of 2020 or 2021). Take out the high of 17 in 2013 and the low of 9 last summer and you get an average of 12.5 each summer…. which suggests extremely consistency.

Here are films that did Top 5 business in these summers that were not sequels or expected to perform like they did.

2012 - Brave, Ted
2013 - n/a
2014 - Guardians 1 and Maleficent (which like Barbie, twists the original)
2015 - Inside Out, Minions, Pitch Perfect 2
2016 - The Secret Lives of Pets, Suicide Squad
2017 - Wonder Woman, Dunkirk
2018 - n/a
2019 - n/a
2022 - Top Gun: Maverick
2023 - Barbie, Oppenheimer

Even in the 3 summers that were Top 5 owned fully by sequels, 2013 had World War Z, The Heat, Great Gatsby, and The Conjuring in the Top 10… 2018 had Oceans 8 and The Meg… 2019 had Wick 3, Detective Pikachu, and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

None of this is meant to minimize the huge success of Barbie and Oppenheimer this summer. But the savior narrative is crap… as it was last summer with Top Gun: Maverick.

The average total summer gross for each of the last 10 summers - 2020/2021 excluded - is $4.2 billion.

Didn’t get there this summer or last summer. Neither did 2017 or 2014.

2016 is still the high. People forget that Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame didn’t win their summers domestically.

But the story is that the summer box office is very consistent and how the money splits up between the films varies from year to year. Just because box office projections anticipated the lean to be much more heavily to sequels this summer doesn’t mean that something shocking happened overall.

Again… Oppy… BarbieHeimer was shocking. But if you understand the flow of summers, it’s not.

Across the Indyverse