Summer movie season 2024 has come to an end – and here’s a look at where the blockbuster world has ended up.
The big kick off for summer movie blockbuster season 2024 was, not too long ago now, The Fall Guy. Remember that? Because in the aftermath of its release, you could have been forgiven for thinking the movies were doomed.
Headlined by two huge movie stars in the shape of Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling, it was full of wit, strong stunts, and the feeling throughout that people had put in a massive shift to make the film work. The details fitted, there were sly things threaded in for movie nerds to enjoy – crucially, being the gravy over the meal, rather than the meal itself – and I found it a hugely entertaining two hours. Things were off to a good start I though, as I filed a positive review.
And yet when the film arrived in cinemas and failed to ignite, it suggested that summer movies were already in trouble.
I was hardly out on a limb in really liking The Fall Guy, but absent from its list of achievements was putting sufficient bums on seats. Sure, there were possible reasons. Basing a movie on an old TV show is always a bit of a gamble, even if the marketing for the film suggested it was a standalone original. Making a film that’s not part of an obvious franchise or with a Roman numeral in the title is even more challenging. The Fall Guy seemed to demonstrate that movie stars weren’t enough, no matter how good the film concerned is.
Hollywood outlets soon pressed the button on stories suggesting that Universal Pictures was going to take a loss on the film. Appreciating that Hollywood is ruled by quarterly reports, these stories still baffle me: a decent film will keep earning money in perpetuity, and The Fall Guy will comfortably have turned a profit within a decade or so. Yet in 2024, with cinema vulnerable, the headlines sadly hit the mark.
Still, no matter: onto the next treat, the return of George Miller to the Mad Max saga with Furiosa. Like many of you, I’m a huge fan of Mad Max: Fury Road in particular, which for me just eclipses The Road Warrior as the highlight of the franchise. It’d been well known that Miller and his team had shipped another bunch of vehicles out into the desert, and that his camera was going to eat it all up.
So it proved. While not the equal of Mad Max: Fury Road, I sat watching Furiosa thinking – as many had – that nobody is making films like this anymore. Conscious that Fury Road was hardly a billion-dollar juggernaut, it still found an audience, and I saw little reason to suspect Furiosa wouldn’t too.
I was hardly out on a limb again. But also, here was a second strong blockbuster that failed to catch on with audiences.
No matter, I thought. I settled in to watch Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter One, the first of star, writer and director Kevin Costner’s planned series of four westerns. This time, I didn’t go in naïve, thinking a three-hour opening film, a western at that, was hardly going to make the box office go nuclear. It didn’t. I’m a paid-up Kevin Costner fanatic, so I had a great time, but still: as Costner himself will well have known, it was always going to be something of a long shot. All credit to him for taking it.
Those three films are unified by some degree of ambition, to varying degrees of success. I liked all of them, and read with disappointment as the box office numbers came in. I’m not someone who believes that box office is the ultimate arbiter of a film, but neither am I blind to the fact that if a film like The Fall Guy does really well, we get more films of its ilk. The fact that it didn’t makes it harder for the next star-driven action romantic comedy of its ilk that comes down the line. Also, a fifth Mad Max film looks pretty much impossible. Horizon only keeps going because Kevin Costner’s willing to pay a chunk of the bill.
In the end, after years in the doldrums, this summer’s blockbuster season saw multiplex owners once again indebted to Disney. The firm rediscovered its ability to find an audience of scale again. It’s done this by retreating to familiar playbooks, but still: it’s delivered two different billion dollar films, at a point that cinema needed
One of those, Inside Out 2, has given Pixar a much-needed confidence boost. I was charmed by the movie too, a sequel that worked hard to creatively justify its existence, and I think just about managed it. Stuck next to something as production line as Despicable Me 4 – which in fairness has also packed-out cinemas as well – and it’s a welcome reminder of why cinema could really use a healthy, supported and properly-backed Pixar.
The gigantic success of Deadpool And Wolverine meanwhile has felt preordained since the moment it was announced. I’m not keen on the film at all personally, for a bunch of reasons I may explore another time. I guess at heart I’m torn that I’m thrilled its kept cinemas busy, but sad that – against a far, far better movie nerd film like The Fall Guy – it’s emerged so heavily victorious. Still, I never claimed to be in step with popular opinion, and this summer has been the latest proof.
Lest we forget too, Disney’s enjoyed two other hits from its Fox catalogue, courtesy of franchise revivals. I think Alien: Romulus was a better film than Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes, but both did what Disney wanted them to do. It put the respective franchises back on the map, made a few hundred million in box office takings, and refuelled franchise interest on Disney+. Given that Predator reboot Prey didn’t see the inside of a cinema and went straight to streaming, seeing the Alien saga in particular back on the big screen – given that Romulus was at one stage earmarked for Disney+ – was very welcome.
Outside of Disney, I want to acknowledge the success of Bad Boys For Life, which I confess I didn’t see. But then there was a film in the midst of things that hit a sweet spot for me: Twisters.
As someone who never really found the original much more than throwaway, I was sat for half an hour of the film thinking I was quite enjoying it. Then 15 minutes later, I realised I was having a blast. Coming to a stop at just around the two-hour mark, Twisters demonstrated that a belated sequel – nearly 30 years! – married up to an interesting filmmaker can deliver a result. I’m half-expecting a sequel to The Mask directed by Bong Joon-ho at this rate.
The odd bit of Twisters was that it was a very big US hit, less so outside of the States. Maybe gust ‘em ups are an American thing?
It’s been an odd summer. Hollywood – and Disney in particular – has demonstrated that it’s re-captured the ability to come up with a hit, but against that, the parameters as to what kind of film a mass audience will go out to see appear to have narrowed. I don’t think there’s much mystery as to why: the cost of a cinema ticket is something we’ve addressed before, and remains a huge concern.
Furthermore, as audience members, we’re savvy to the fact that a movie’s all but certain to be available via video on demand within a calendar month. Even a hit movie such as A Quiet Place: Day One has popped up for home rental at speed, in spite of turning into a tidy box office performer for Paramount (a studio who also scored a small hit this summer with John Krasinski’s impressive If).
In terms of where we’ve ended up: well, it’s hard to tell. I’d bet heavily that meetings within the Disney empire have been taking place to iron out the possibility of a third Inside Out movie, while in the Marvel department, Hugh and Ryan must have had at least a speculative phone call about putting together another two hours of in-jokes.
Elsewhere, plans for another Mad Max film presumably lie in commercial tatters – is that the last time we’ve seen George Miller make a film on such a sizeable canvas? – and Kevin Costner’s Horizon release approach is undergoing a course correction. Those who played the safe chips on the whole have been rewarded, those who took the gambles have been left with a bunch of invoices to pay.
I would say it’s been, against this backdrop, a pretty good summer season for movies, not least given concerns that last year’s dual strike actions would have had a negative impact on just what films got through the system in time. But I do think we’ve ended up with risk likely to be even more alien to Hollywood executives than ever before. And let’s face it, they were hardly being brassy with their chips anyway.
Thank goodness for the outlier: Longlegs.
As those who spent their money to give it $100m of business around the world found out, it’s an unusual film to be released in the cinema, and heart has been taken from the fact that it found an audience.
Arguably the best marketed film of the season, it’s the film that offers hope for non-franchise fare in high summer.
A one-off fluke? Hope not, because at the moment, Marvel is surely going through the cupboard to arrange a whole host of further cameos for another meta multiverse shindig in the near future. Those can only work for so long – but, in fairness, it’s done the job for multiplexes this summer…
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