From Solo: A Star Wars Story to the indie smashes of the season, we look at the box office winners and losers of summer 2018.
Last summer, the domestic Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets cost their respective studios hundreds of millions of dollars. Audiences just didn’t seem too enthused by what was on offer, and so the industry saw new attendance lows. Coming into this summer, many feared a repeat of 2017.
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Fortunately, this year saw the box office burst back to full health. The season was helped by more unmissable event films than the previous year, with some much-anticipated blockbusters that broke box office records at home and abroad. As the season rolls to a close, we take a look at the biggest hits and disasters of summer 2018.
- This Page: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, and Solo
- Page 2: Hereditary, Eighth Grade, and Skyscraper
- Page 3: Incredibles 2, Jurassic World 2, and The Darkest Minds
- Page 4: Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, and The Meg
Winner - Avengers: Infinity War
The definition of a Avengers: Infinity War made a surprise release date move from May to mid-April.
Whatever way you define summer, it’s hard to deny that Infinity War was the clear winner this year. pre-sales records and had the second highest ever opening day gross in America. It stayed in the box office top ten for nine weeks, and is still playing in certain theaters.
Marvel has had a strong grasp on the box office all year. Black Panther’s commercial, critical and cultural impact. The fact that audiences were still able to see it in the cinema in August is a testament to that.
Loser - Solo: A Star Wars Story
It seemed inevitable that this new era of Ron Howard took over directing duties, extensive reshoots took place (which pushed the budget to $250m), and Disney and Lucasfilm decided to keep the movie’s May 2018 release. While reviews were solid, the buzz was tepid and audiences just didn’t seem all that interested in a Han Solo origin story.
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11 weeks into its release and Solo has yet to make back its budget domestically. Worldwide, it's barely scraped past $390m, which will lead to a major write-off for both Disney and Lucasfilm. In of true box office flops this summer, Solo is really the only disaster, although it's unlikely Disney or Lucasfilm will struggle much in the aftermath given the gargantuan successes of everything else on their slate.
Winner - Deadpool 2
Surprising no one, the Merc With a Mouth came back with style in his big summer sequel, great new Céline Dion song out of it.
Page 2: Hereditary, Eighth Grade, and Skyscraper
Winner – A24’s Hereditary and Eighth Grade
Indie giant A24 has climbed the ranks of independent and small-scale film distribution at a meteoric pace, thanks to successes like Good Time. By now, their name has become a byword for a certain kind of indie movie experience, and critics and casual filmgoers alike are likely to see their interest in a project piqued by the distributor’s name alone. Dare we say it, A24 are now on the same level of indie movie prestige and celebration that Miramax achieved in the mid-1990s.
This summer, the distributor released a slew of hits big and small. Paul Schrader made a barnstorming return to form with the brilliant thriller Eighth Grade.
Each film was a directorial debut with premises that could have been hard sells to general audiences. However, hanks to a savvy combination of well-made marketing, adoring critical praise and good timing, both have seen major box office results this summer. Sorry To Bother You - proving that summer doesn't have to be just about blockbusters.
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Loser – Skyscraper
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has, by and large, been an unstoppable force of box office might. From the Rampage - a video game adaptation involving a giant mutated gorilla - into a hit. Aside from a minor blip with the big-screen Baywatch movie, Johnson has become one of the rare actors in Hollywood who can open a movie based on his name alone.
Alas, that magic didn’t carry over to Skyscraper was primarily made to appeal to that audience).
Page 3: Incredibles 2, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Darkest Minds
Winner - Incredibles 2
It’s been 14 years since Cars 3 – it seemed inevitable that the Parr family would get a second outing. But how would audiences react to a second Incredibles movie almost a decade and a half since the first one, and in an era where superhero movies are the bedrock of Hollywood?
Incredibles 2 opened to record breaking numbers. Its $180m opening weekend represented a new peak for animated films and was also the eighth largest opening of all time domestically. It topped $1bn worldwide, but the most surprising fact about that number is that the majority of that gross - over 55% - came from American audiences. This was a major tent-pole release that did not need to rely on international numbers for the lion's share of its box office take. Given continuing fears that North American audiences are rejecting the cinematic experience, this can certainly be chalked up as a major victory in Disney's corner.
RELATED: Incredibles 2 Crosses the $1 Billion Mark Worldwide
Loser – The Darkest Minds
The young adult boom that followed the successes of Divergent series didn’t even get an ending as its third film flopped hard enough for the franchise to be shelved completely.
The Darkest Minds marked the live-action debut of Kung Fu Panda 2 director Jennifer Yuh Nelson and starred Amandla Stenberg, who played Rue in The Hunger Games. The adaptation of Jennifer Bracken’s popular dystopian series looked good on paper – a group of teenagers with mysterious powers escape an internment camp and go on the run from the government – but it couldn’t help but feel hopelessly out of trend by the time it premiered. In its opening weekend, it barely scraped to the number 8 spot on the box office with a gross of $5.8m from 3127 theatres.
The books have their fans, but they never reached the stratospheric heights of success that made The Hunger Games so huge, so there wasn’t much of a built-in fanbase for the film. Add to that mediocre reviews and general disinterest on the genre and this one sank on arrival. YA trends come and go, and often it’s tough for Hollywood to keep up. Here’s hoping Stenberg’s next YA movie, an adaptation of the political drama The Hate U Give, fares better.
Winner – Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
J.A. Bayona's sequel to Colin Trevorrow's successful 2015 reboot Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has so far grossed more than $1.27 billion worldwide since its mid-June release, with the bulk of that box office take (68%) coming from overseas markets. The movie did particularly well in China, where it grossed a staggering $248 million - proving once again that a successful release in China has the power to make or break a blockbuster (though in this case, the movie would have done just fine even without that extra quarter-million).
It may have been divisive among fans and critics, but there's no denying that the reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise has been a massive commercial success for Universal Pictures, and we won't have to wait long for the next movie. game-changing ending.
Page 4: Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, and The Meg
Winner – Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Over the course of 22 years, the Tom Cruise to indulge his every movie star whim. It turns out that’s exactly what audiences want from Cruise, whose public image had taken a major hit following his ardent Scientology . Movie lovers want to see Cruise doing daring stunts and being an old-school action man, something the Mission: Impossible movies offer with gusto.
RELATED: Mission: Impossible 6 Has Franchise Best Second Weekend
The sixth addition to the franchise, Christopher Robin with ease, and it's already made back over double its budget worldwide.
Winner – Documentaries
Traditionally, documentaries have always been popular with audiences, but getting them to leave the house and pay cinema price tickets to see was a different matter. Netflix have been filling with great success, with their roster of original feature length, short and documentary series picking them up a slew of awards, including an Oscar. Yet this Summer, it seemed that movie-going audiences were hungry for true stories.
The season brought a wide selection of critically acclaimed documentaries that saw bigger than expected box office numbers: RGB, focusing on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; the long-awaited biography of Mr. Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?; McQueen, centered on the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen; the Sundance hit Three Identical Strangers; and Generation Wealth, a look into the world of the mega rich. The highest grossing documentaries tend to center on divisive politics or concerts of major music stars, so to see a Summer of stories as varied as these documentaries offered getting major love with audiences proved to be one of the real surprises of the season.
Surprise Winner: The Meg
Much to the surprise of basically everyone, Jason Statham's giant shark movie, Ocean's 8.
The overseas grosses were greatly bolstered in China, where Gravity Pictures put up a major portion of the film's budget. For a film with a budget of around $150m and middling reviews, those numbers are a minor miracle. The movie isn't out of deep waters just yet but this is a heartily encouraging start. It seems we can all agree on the majesty of a giant shark.
