In summer, Hollywood can still pretend to be itself. Beyond September, the long slog of the Oscar race now sees once all-powerful studios cast as also-rans. (The reigning Best Picture, Anora, was released by New York indie Neon.) Christmas, meanwhile, belongs to Netflix, the festive season delivering record new subscriptions: 19mn in Q4 2024.
But when skies are blue, the studios relive lost glories. As if the 1980s had never ended, summer cinemas fill with the collective blockbusters of Warner Bros, Disney, Universal and Paramount. For a few sunshine weeks, their executives are more than mere punchlines in streaming hit The Studio.
You could say Hollywood looks forward to summer like an eager child. A better comparison might be an ice cream van owner with money worries and a slim window of opportunity. For all the upheaval in the industry, summer still sees billions banked from family outings and people who don’t go to the cinema at any other time. And like that ice cream van, much of the colourful stock will be old favourites. For ticket-buyers as well as executives, nostalgia rules.
Witness the summer release schedule. Out already is 28 Years Later, second sequel to the 2002 zombie film. Soon to come is Jurassic World Rebirth: prehistory born again, again; Superman returns in the hands of comic-book movie impresario James Gunn; the latest Marvel, Fantastic Four: First Steps, relaunches a team last seen in 2015. The Naked Gun is to fire again; Freaky Friday will get Freakier. I Know What You Did Last Summer is a follow-up to the 1990s teen slasher that no one could even be bothered to give a different title.
Life beyond the franchise isn’t quite extinct. Pixar has just released Elio, an original tale of a kid with a yen for outer space. And for the over-10s there is a single high-profile title not tied to previous instalments: F1, an Imax-sized motor-racing drama made with unprecedented access to the tracks and drivers of Formula 1. But even this has an old-time edge. The star is veteran Brad Pitt, and the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose links with summer at the multiplex go back to the Reagan presidency and Top Gun.
When it first came to market seeking funding, F1 caused high excitement in traditional Hollywood. A 2022 bidding war included Sony, Paramount, Universal and MGM (before the latter was bought by Amazon). The outcome said a lot about the modern movie business. In the end, the project was bought by Apple. (The budget has since been reported as $300mn.) F1 will be released through Warner Bros, but that storied company will only be doing the grunt work of distribution. Yesterday’s mogul is today’s hired help. The fact that Apple also makes movie business satire The Studio is almost too perfect.
But then, punts on standalone summer movies are an expensive habit, one at which old Hollywood has reason to take fright. This time last year, an apocalyptic box office mood was relieved only by sequels and spin-offs. Released in June, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 became the most popular movie of the year. Its nearest rival came out a month later, gonzo superhero mash-up Deadpool & Wolverine. Between them, the films grossed $3bn worldwide, leading a cavalry of hit summer retreads: Twisters, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Despicable Me 4.
You may be puzzled. Perhaps the last time you personally went to a summer movie was 2023, to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and/or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Each was an original story. Both did huge numbers. But their success has to be weighed against the direction of half a Hollywood century.
As movie fans know, this summer also marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws. That, of course, was the movie that first turned the season into a box office feeding frenzy. It also made a god of the High Concept: the story idea it took just a nanosecond to sell. (Alien? Jaws in space — and so on.)
But even the High Concept would end up swallowed by another predator. In fact, the film that changed the movies was less Jaws than Jaws 2. Released three summers later in 1978, it was deeply mediocre: unambitious, uninventive, dull. It also enjoyed what was then the most successful opening weekend in US box office history, before going on to gross $208mn, against a budget of $20mn.
There is nothing new under the sun: Hollywood has been churning out sequels since it started making movies. (And critics have moaned about them almost as long.) But after the earthquake of Jaws, Jaws 2 reshaped the movie landscape in ways that have endured ever since. The film wasn’t good, but it was good enough to make 10 times its money back. From there, why wouldn’t Hollywood focus ever more tightly on product able to spawn spin-offs until, in the end, that was all there was?
Over decades, the more studios passed on new stories told at summer movie scale, the less skill their staff needed in developing big ideas. “Barbenheimer”, then, became twin exceptions that proved the rule. Nolan is the one working director left whose fan base means he is the High Concept. Barbie was a giant slab of Intellectual Property even before a marketing spend that did everything but physically frogmarch the public into cinemas.
F1 draws on some of the same principles. The movie is not quite High Concept. A motorsport is not, in itself, a story. But it does bring vast brand awareness, enhanced by co-producer Lewis Hamilton securing real-world Formula 1 trappings.
Just as crucial are the behind-the-scenes team of Bruckheimer, writer Ehren Kruger and director Joseph Kosinski. None have Nolan’s fame. And yet when Apple bought F1 in June 2022, the film the three had just released was widely seen to have saved the movies: Top Gun: Maverick credited with rescuing not just summer blockbusters, but the very business model of cinema post-Covid.
Top Gun had only avoided a follow-up back in the 1980s because then rising star Tom Cruise said no. By summer 2022, between the pandemic and the age of the original, Maverick felt like a sequel with the risk factor of a standalone movie. Now, though, F1 is a standalone with some of the creative insurance of a sequel. Kosinski and Kruger won’t sell many tickets on name recognition. But the movie promises the same hyper-real oomph in its racing scenes that Maverick had mid-air, the kind of technical brilliance for which Kosinski has a stellar industry reputation. Meanwhile, Kruger’s story finds Pitt’s battered old stager mentoring an up-and-comer, much as Cruise did three years ago.
And yet. The movie still depends on the high-wire commodity of actual talent. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first persuade to release a $300mn summer movie without a pre-sold line of expectant children, or Christopher Nolan fans. For Apple — even with box office just a small part of an opaque tally of success and failure — a flop will be a flop. The company is almost certainly anxious. So, perhaps, should movie-goers be in general.
After all, among the companies that overthrew old Hollywood, neither Amazon nor Netflix much make the kind of films you watch if you actually like films. That leaves Apple, whose output has grown more interesting over time, while backing the kind of driven auteur — Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Steve McQueen — studios no longer support. But nothing is forever. There have already been reports the fate of F1 could, at the least, dictate whether the company funds more blockbusters.
Which leaves the original summer movie clinging to the cliff by its fingertips. It would be a shame if it fell. By the coldest commercial logic, future franchises have to start somewhere, unless we are all just to watch the Minions until we die. At the movies as in life, everything worthwhile was once a new idea. And if summer is when people actually come to the cinema, it might be wise to remind them how great the unexpected can be. To show them Jaws, in other words, rather than Jaws 2 — the Eureka, not just its sequel.
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