Box Office Analysis: Can The Summer Be Saved?? (Spoiler Alert: Yes!)

Last summer, a cavalcade of pessimistic reports came flooding in about how the movies were dead, people hated film, the box office was a thing of the past, simply because movies like The Lone Ranger and RIPD flopped. Ironically, several of those critics are now waxing nostalgic about last years box office, wishing this years lower grossing movies could take a page from big hits released last summer. Ah, the irony!!
But it isn't just a major showing of media hypocrisy that's notable about this situation. Indeed, this summer has had it's ups and down. The ups have included a record breaking umber of movies opening over $90 million this summer, as well as the big sleeper hit The Fault In Our Stars. On the other hand, films like A Million Ways To Die In The West, Think Like A Man, and most bizarrely, How To Train Your Dragon 2 have underperformed. Transformers: Age of Extinction can only do so much people!

Like previous summers, or really any time a poor crop of movies failed to perform like The Avengers, box office analysts will go into a frenzy today declaring some recent poor box office as the decline of cinema, but really, all it should be taken as is a warning to future filmmakers that E.T. rip-offs aren't guaranteed moneymakers. Since a headline like "Summer Box Office Doing Great Buisness" won't get as many clicks as "Movies Are Dead...The Murderer Is VOD!", we won't be seeing as much coverage of when Dawn of The Planet of The Apes makes a lot of moolah this weekend. And if my gut instincts turn out to be true, the disappointing returns of Hercules will get far more coverage than the success of Lucy.

H Don't let the overly negative atmosphere that unnamed analysts (*cough* Variety *Cough*) conjure up dilute the successes of this summer. Now, to be honest, yeah, this past weekend was awful. In fact, this was the first 4th of July in 13 years not to have a movie hit $40 million over the weekend (when it happened in 2001, the No. 1 movie was Cats & Dogs). So anyone wanting to talk trash about this specific weekend, please, come join me. But trying to turn it into some harbinger of doom for the rest of the summer feels ridiculous. The box office paranoia that consumed conversation last summer was more annoying than enlightening, so let's just avoid all of that, shall we?