Which movies brought in big crowds over the summer.
I certainly hope you like robot movies, live-action fairy tales, or superhero dramas, because based on this summer’s box office, those are the types of movies Hollywood will make in the future.
Transformers: Age of Extinction, Maleficent and Guardians of the Galaxy (GOTG) took the top three spots as the highest grossing movies this summer in the United States. Transformers and GOTG already have confirmed sequels, while Maleficent has no plans for a sequel. Don’t worry though, if you love fairy tales, Disney will soon be making a live-action version of The Jungle Book.
Although these movies made a huge splash this summer, it has been a disappointing year for the box office overall. Movies like Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow and DreamWorks’s How To Train Your Dragon 2 (HTTYD) expected to produce big numbers from their multimillion-dollar budgets, but barely made an impression domestically. Thankfully, the global box office saved these movies as both made more than double their U.S. earnings overseas.
This is great news for HTTYD fans because the third movie could have been put in limbo if the foreign box office hadn’t saved it. In fact, the second installment provided China with its biggest animated movie debut ever.
Along with the multimillion-dollar disappointments came surprise hits that grossed at least 15 times their budgets. The frat star comedy Neighbors and the young adult tragic love story, The Fault in Our Stars, had small budgets that both ended up making 274 million dollars combined. Comedies faired pretty well this summer overall with hits like 22 Jump Street and The Other Woman.
And to keep with the trend of turning books into movies, John Green’s other novel Paper Towns will soon be in the works. Hopefully this time the producers will learn to stick to the book’s source material instead of changing it to match current trends, unlike with what they did with The Giver. Which completely failed, by the way.
So you heard it here first: in the summers to come, the box office will continue to produce robot movies, fairy tales, superhero dramas, young adult book adaptations, and comedies: a little something for everyone.