by Maxwell Meyers
Above: The premiere of "Guardians of the Galaxy," the highest-grossing movie of summer 2014
Every year, when the world starts cooling down, movie pundits start
asking who won the summer. What does
this mean, you might ask? Well, I'll
tell you. Each year, studio executives
schedule release dates for movies based on when certain kinds of films are
likely to sell tickets. Usually, you can
count on October, November, and December being reserved for Oscar gold-seekers
(case in point: best picture winners like “The Artist,” “Argo,” and “12 Years a
Slave”), but the summer months are a different story. Summer is for the blockbusters—crowd-pleasing
movies like “Transformers” that attempt to appeal to as many people as
possible.
But is it possible to predict where
on the release schedule that the iron is hot? Does it matter? When are the summer months? Don't I have better things to do with my time?
Let's take this one question at a time (the last one is easy, yes.
But this is interesting, so just stay
with me).
If you ask most people on the
street what the summer months are, they would tell you that they’re June, July,
and August. Yet in the case of films,
Hollywood has decided that summer actually starts in May, usually with a Marvel
movie, or sometimes a new Pixar opus. In essence, studios consider May to be a
wading period to dish out films that mentally prepare you for the movies coming
in the hotter months. Just look at
Sony’s “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”—not only was it the first high-profile film
of this summer, but it also tried to prime audiences for the months ahead by
featuring previews for would-be blockbusters like “The Expendables 3” and “22
Jump Street” (for bonus points, “Spider-Man” included a mid-credits teaser for
“X-Men: Days of Future Past”).
All this is, of course, was an
attempt by the studios to make sure you became a returning customer. But winning the summer depends on more than
audience interest—it depends on when a movie is released. And while some might be skeptical of this
concept, the numbers may surprise you. According to boxofficemojo.com, an average of
thirty-three films are released each June—four of which typically wind up in
the top twenty-five highest-grossing films of the year. And for studios looking to win the entire
kitchen caboodle, July is even hotter.
Films released during that month not only have an eighty-seven percent
chance of being in the top twenty-five, but becoming the highest-grossing film
of the year as well.
By contrast, picking the wrong
month can doom a movie to financial failure.
There has never, for instance, been an August movie that has become the
highest-grossing movie in a given year. The
irony? That on average, forty movies
are released in August each year.
Despite the threat of oversaturation in the market, studios keep betting
they can score the next off-season hit (in the vein of “Guardians of Galaxy,”
which was a critical and commercial blockbuster in August of this year).
But what does this all mean? Do any of these financial statistics matter? That depends on the movie you are releasing
and whether or not you are an executive at Warner Bros. But as a consumer, it's hard to say we truly
lose. In the scramble to score prime
release dates, studios have been pumping out hundreds of movies, meaning that there
are now more choices for everyone. The
only problem is that with not enough time or money on hand, it seems the
hardest choice is choosing a move to see on a Friday night.
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