September is here, and the fall film festivals have started —check out our Venice coverage so far, and our Telluride coverage starts tomorrow and TIFF next week. Nevertheless, the days are getting shorter and the temperature a little cooler, so it’s time to look back on 2016’s moviegoing summer.
In most respects, it was a bad one. Most tentpoles disappointed, and unusually, it seemed that most underperformed at the box office (though it’s interesting to note that total box office is up about 3% from last year, thanks to a few monster hits). Even the indie and foreign scenes seemed a bit more muted than usual.
Yet there were some movies, companies and trends that have been doing well, and a few great, or at least very good films too. So to help you draw a line under the Summer of 2016, below you’ll find our wrap-up, picking out the seasons’ winners and losers from a box office point of view, as well as the 10 best and 5 worst films of the last few months. Let us know what you’ve observed and what you liked, and here’s to a much, much better fall.
It Was A Good Summer For…
The Marvel Cinematic Universe
Every summer’s a good summer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, isn’t it? But “Captain America: Civil War,” the first tentpole of the summer season, was an unqualified success and the season’s biggest film worldwide. The fourth film in the mega-franchise to top a billion dollars outperformed the previous “Captain America” by about $400 million, which is no mean feat, and while it came about $250 million under “Age Of Ultron,” that’s not remotely a problem, and we’d expect another uptick next time we get an “Avengers” movie. Perhaps more importantly, it was probably the best blockbuster of the summer and a definite highlight of the MCU. After two creatively underwhelming movies with ‘Ultron’ and “Ant-Man,” it was important to restore some goodwill —the kind of goodwill that rivals DC Films are increasingly running out of.
The New Indie/Mini Major Distributors
There’s an interesting shift going on in the indie microcosm right now, and while some of the traditional mini-major distributors are having a rough year, the more recent arrivals are doing quite nicely on the whole. STX lost out with “Free State Of Jones,” but delivered a much-needed surprise smash with “Bad Moms,” which looks to be closing on in $100 million with legs better than anything else this summer. The oft-ailing CBS Films had a late-summer sleeper with “Hell Or High Water,” which is currently nearly at $10 million and will likely reach at least double that, while Bleecker Street built on the shock hit of “Eye In The Sky” with decent returns for “Captain Fantastic” and even “Anthropoid.” Meanwhile, not every pic from trendy indie distributors A24 worked (“Equals” took just $33,000,” “Into The Forest” even less), but many are covered by their DirectTV deal, and nearly $10 million for “The Lobster” and over $4 million for “Green Room” have to be seen as triumphs.
Animation
If there’s one genre that’s almost a guaranteed money-maker these days, it’s animation. Right now, four of the top six movies of the year are CGI animations (if you count “The Jungle Book,” which you should), with “Finding Dory” the biggest movie of the year domestically (and the seventh biggest ever in the U.S. and the biggest-ever animation). It’s not just Pixar either: “The Secret Life Of Pets” quietly took $350 million and counting in the U.S., more than “Minions” and despite being a new property. Even R-rated animation fare paid off, with the foul-mouthed “Sausage Party” becoming a surprise August hit. The only studio with a strong animation portfolio that hasn’t benefitted from the Midas Touch is Laika, whose “Kubo & The Magic Strings” looks to be its lowest grosser despite great reviews, but we’d politely suggest that if Focus stopped releasing these movies in the depths of August, they might do a bit better.
The Weepie
The tearjerker is one of the oldest genres in Hollywood, and though it’s never fashionable, every so often a movie pops up that proves why it’s endured so long. We’ve had “The Notebook” and “The Vow” in recent years, and this year it was “Me Before You.” Yes, that movie with Khaleesi and the Prince Harry-looking guy, the one you probably didn’t see. The film was a solid double in the U.S., taking $56 million off its $20 million budget, but it was enormous internationally, making $141 million with particularly strong showings in Brazil, Germany, Mexico and the UK. That’s a total of nearly $200 million, more than “The Notebook” or “The Vow” ever took, and more than “Divergent: Allegiant,” “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” or “The BFG” made this year. It’s likely one of the most purely profitable films of the year and while it suggests that both Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin have earned some box office cred abroad thanks to “Game Of Thrones” and “The Hunger Games,” it also serves as a reminder of the potency of mid-budget romantic drama.
Low Budget Horror/Thrillers
Frankly, this list would probably include an entry for Low Budget Horror every year: it’s an evergreen road to profitability. But it’s been striking in the last few months that, with so many studio movies failing, the unqualified hits have all been horrors or thrillers made for the cost of the catering budget on a superhero movie. Admittedly, Kevin Bacon vehicle “The Darkness” didn’t get the summer off to a great start with only $10 million, but then again it didn’t appear to be marketed at all. “The Conjuring 2” earned less than its predecessor, but with nearly $300 million on a $40 million budget, it’s still printing money. Things got even better for the genre in the second half of the summer. “The Shallows,” “The Purge: Election Year,” “Lights Out” and “Don’t Breathe” cost, $17 million, $10 million, $7.9 million and $9.9 million, respectively. They’ve made $93 million, $103 million, $126 million and $33 million, respectively (but “Don’t Breathe” only just opened, and will likely make it to at least a similar figure or perhaps higher). The day of the B-movie programmer is clearly not dead, because these films are raking it in.
The Rock (And Kevin Hart)
Our beloved Rock has had a long path to true movie stardom: he’s certainly come a long way from “The Scorpion King.” But while he shored up his bankability in recent years by giving a boost to other franchises in films like “Fast Five” and “Journey 2,” Johnson had a harder time with his own vehicles: as recently as the last two or three years, films like “Snitch,” “Pain & Gain” and “Hercules” underperformed hugely. But those days look to be over —“San Andreas” was a smash last year, and “Central Intelligence” did brilliantly this year. Despite being a relatively rare big studio movie not based on existing intellectual property, the action-comedy opened decently, had much better legs than most movies this year, and has now taken over $125 million in the U.S., more than “Ghostbusters” or “Independence Day: Resurgence.” It’s also a boost for co-star Kevin Hart, in that the film performed much better than his films usually do internationally. Rawson Marshall Thurber’s film was also good for both actors creatively: Johnson’s utterly lovable performance is honestly one of our favorites of the year, and Hart shows more range than usual as the relative straight man.
Pixar
It’s been a few years with some ups and downs at Pixar. A number of movies like “Cars 2,” “Brave,” “Monsters University” were received more middlingly than the studio is used to, production troubles on “The Good Dinosaur” saw the studio skip 2014 entirely, and then that movie opened last November and became their first flop. But in between, “Inside Out” returned them to blockbuster, Oscar-winning form with one of its best ever films, and “Finding Dory” saw the bounce back continue, becoming the year’s biggest grosser in the U.S., reclaiming the top-grossing animation crown from “Frozen,” and likely becoming its second billion-dollar movie. The film’s probably destined to be in the second half of your endless Ranking Pixar lists: it’s a minor film that doesn’t quite feel as special as its predecessor. But it’s still as joyful and inventive as we’ve come to expect, suggesting that Pixar’s blip is over (checks release calendar, sees “Cars 3” scheduled for release next summer, sighs).
“Hell Or High Water”
Of all the movies to overperform this summer, we were most surprised by “Hell Or High Water.” David Mackenzie’s neo-Western with Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges was well received at Cannes, but also went overshadowed to some degree. It seemed like it had the potential to be closer to an “Out Of The Furnace” —an over-familiar, meat-and-potatoes crime pic that mostly disappeared from theaters. But it looks set to be one of the biggest platform releases of the year, taking in $10 million after just three weeks in theaters, and still not playing in more than a thousand theaters. Reviews on release have been stellar, word of mouth seemingly even better, and it looks that it could play well into the fall. It likely won’t match last September’s sleeper “Sicario” (also penned by writer Taylor Sheridan), but it could easily crest thirty million if it keeps expanding well.
Mike Birbiglia
Few indie filmmakers can say they’re more committed to pulling in an audience for their work than Mike Birbiglia. The comic/actor/writer/director has won fans as a stand-up and with performances in “Orange Is The New Black” and “Trainwreck,” but he’s hardly a household name. And yet despite minimal budgets, a lack of big-name draws and a heap of competition, his “Don’t Think Twice” has been a consistently good performer this summer, following in the footsteps of “Sleepwalk With Me” a few years back. Aided by Ira Glass as a producer, Twitter pushes from famous friends like Judd Apatow, and a commitment to live Q&As (the first weekend at a single theater pulled in a staggering screen average of over $90,000), Birbiglia’s steadily seen his improv comedy find audiences across the country, no mean feat given how insular the subject matter could be. It’s already nearly matched the already-impressive total of $2.5 million that “Sleepwalk With Me” and it’s still expanding —it’s by far the biggest film of distributor The Film Arcade, which must be delighted.
Netflix & HBO
A mostly crappy movie summer is Netflix’s gain, and it’s notable that the biggest pop culture talking point of the summer wasn’t a film, but the streaming service’s “Stranger Things” (and to a slightly lesser, but still impressive, extent, HBO’s miniseries “The Night Of”). In some respects, it wasn’t a great TV summer —“Mr. Robot” and “UnREAL” had serious sophomore slumps, high-profile debuts like “The Get Down” and “Roadies” disappointed and “Preacher” ran out of steam quickly. But “Stranger Things” became a huge word-of-mouth hit and appears to have been one of Netflix’s biggest shows to date, inspiring adulation from fans and a billion blog posts. It’s interesting in particular because “Stranger Things” feels like a summer blockbuster of old, paying tribute to films like “E.T.” as it does, and it’s connected in a way that the CGI-packed franchises really hadn’t with the zeitgeist. Meanwhile, “The Night Of”’s success was in some ways more slow-burning, but for a sober crime miniseries in the height of summer, it’s done remarkably well, out-rating more hyped HBO shows like “Ballers,” “Veep” and “The Leftovers,” and again driving the conversation. Given its long route to the small screen, it must feel like a vindication for those behind it.