Summer is when we know Hollywood will bring out the big guns: the biggest stars, the most-anticipated sequels, and its most over-the-top special effects. For a lot of us, summer blockbusters like The Avengers, Independence Day, The Lion King, or Star Wars are exactly what we think of when we picture going to the movies. But these days, Hollywood’s “summer” seems to start earlier every year, and studios fill the entire calendar with huge franchises and outsized spectacles. And after the COVID-19 pandemic all but canceled it in 2020, the dominance of the “summer movie” faces its greatest test. Are we facing the end of the summer movie’s long day in the sun? Here’s our Take on how we came to love this unique cultural phenomenon and how it came to shape modern moviegoing.

TRANSCRIPT

Ever since Jaws first popped out of the ocean to terrify some unlucky beachgoers, the summer movie has been pop culture’s dominant beast.

Brody: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” — Jaws

The “summer movie” is the occasion when we know Hollywood will bring out the big guns—the biggest stars, the most-anticipated sequels, its most over-the-top effects, and, yes, the biggest actual guns. For a lot of us, past summer movies like The Avengers, Independence Day, The Lion King, or Star Wars are exactly what we think of when we picture going to the movies. But the summer movie season also seems to start earlier every year—lately inching up even to the last weekend in April.

Meanwhile, studios now fill the calendar all year long with “summer movie”-esque huge franchises and outsized spectacles. And after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced movie theaters to close and pushed most of the biggest summer movies into the fall, winter, or even 2021, the dominance of the summer movie season now faces its greatest test ever.

So after close to 50 years, are we witnessing the end of the summer movie’s long day in the sun? Or does the idea of a summer movie still mean something special? Here’s our Take on how we came to love this unique cultural phenomenon.

What Makes a Summer Movie?

A summer movie can be almost any genre: sci-fi, fantasy, action, horror, comedy—even a war movie, legal thriller, or Best-Picture-winning elegiac western. But broadly speaking, summer movies are the cinematic versions of “beach reads”: books that are meant to be easy-to-follow, entertaining, and—sometimes—disposable.

Jaws was based on a literal beach read from author Peter Benchley, and turned into a literal beach movie. And even when it lacks the swimsuits or the sand, the prevailing purpose of a summer movie is fun.

Much of the summer movie’s dazzle comes in the form of special effects. For decades, summer has been a showcase season for new technological breakthroughs. This wow factor and spectacle bring in a broad audience that might not normally turn up to see a movie on the big screen.

Summer movies are also defined by the casual deployment of megawatt star power. It’s where audiences can expect to see our biggest stars doing what they do best, whether that’s fighting, laughing, or running.

John Anderton: “Everybody runs, Fletch.” — Minority Report

Certain actors have become inextricably linked to the summer movie—perhaps none more so than Will Smith, who scored his first summer smash with 1996’s Independence Day. Smith came to be known as “Mr. July,” reliably churning out summer hit after hit, his name all but guaranteeing a number-one box office opening for a long time. Smith makes a useful case study for what we respond to in summer movie stars.

He comes across as unshakably sure of himself, and there’s seemingly no danger so strange it could break his swagger or cause him to second-guess himself. His confidence makes us feel comfortable, whether he’s piloting a spaceship or a cop car, battling robots, or performing superheroic feats.

There’s a similar assurance to Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose slightly cartoonish physicality allows him to be fully at home in the huge, outlandish worlds of summer movies, while a hint of self-awareness grounds him in our own. Whether he’s a cyborg, an alien-hunting soldier, a super spy, or a supervillain, he is always recognizably “Arnold.”

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a happy medium between Smith and Schwarzenegger—a human special effect who combines an imposing presence with a winking sense of humor.

Bob Stone: “I got a plan. It might get us both killed but if it works it’ll be a totally boss story. Cool?” — Central Intelligence

And Tom Cruise keeps us coming back for more with his seemingly masochistic zeal for putting himself in authentically real danger.

Benji Dunn: “What are you waiting for?”

Ethan Hunt: “I’m jumping out a window!” — Mission Impossible: Fallout

We root for these guys because, as they run from burning skyscrapers and slug their way through death-defying set pieces, they make it look easy—and most importantly, they make it look fun.

Brian O’Conner: “Hey, we do what we do best. We improvise, all right?” — Furious 6

While there isn’t a Ms. July, some women have managed to become summer movie stars—like when Julia Roberts rebounded from a career lull in the mid-1990s with a series of successful romantic comedies, or when her My Best Friend’s Wedding co-star Cameron Diaz followed up her introduction in The Mask with a series of broad comedy summer hits.

If women have only recently begun making inroads into traditional summer movie spectacle, they’ve long made a box-office impact with a sort of counter-programming to the usual action-driven spectacle: big, splashy rom-coms and musicals, date movies, and comedies about women behaving badly.

In the last couple of decades, though, the biggest box-office draw has undoubtedly been intellectual property. Today’s blockbusters bank less on the appeal of a Brie Larson or Chris Pratt than they do the franchise strength of Marvel or Jurassic Park.

This emphasis on brand recognition speaks to what is arguably the most important aspect of a modern summer movie: familiarity. These films, at their most elemental, tend to follow a similar formula: an extraordinary threat emerges, spurring ordinary people into extraordinary action. And while characters may sometimes suffer extraordinary losses along the way, inevitably everything works out. In this, the summer movie delivers the same visceral thrills we get from a roller coaster—volleying us up and down along a carefully designed track that always returns us safely home.

Like the beach reads that first inspired them, summer movies give us permission to relax our standards—to “check your brain at the door,” not overthink it or worry about plotholes and discerning complex themes.

News Reporter: “Yes, a twister in Los Angeles! It’s one of many tornados that are destroying our city! There’s another one!” — The Day After Tomorrow

This idea can be a polarizing one, reflecting a divide between some critics who see it as a catch-all defense of shoddy filmmaking and audiences who just want to enjoy themselves.

Film Producer: “I produced Bad Summer Movie, the parody of bad summer movies that was itself a bad summer movie.” — The Simpsons, 21x1

Even Jaws, now widely considered a classic of American cinema, was derided upon its release as “a noisy, busy movie that has less on its mind than any child on a beach” and “shark stew for the stupefied.”

But while the directive to turn off your brain can sometimes be an excuse for poor moviemaking or even an insult to the audience’s intelligence, it can also be a valid way of meeting a movie on its own terms—enjoying the spectacle and the communal act of moviegoing, even if the movie itself isn’t awards material.

Rambo: “To survive a war, you gotta become war.” — Rambo: First Blood Part II

The pure escapism of the summer movie offers the opportunity to stop worrying about the real world and lose ourselves in the air-conditioned dark—something that sounds, perhaps, more appealing than ever.

The Riddler: “Was that over-the-top? I can never tell!” — Batman Forever

The Summer Movie: An Origin Story

While a modern blockbuster today opens on 3 to 4,000-plus screens, 50 years ago a wide release meant just a few hundred screens. Wider openings—especially summer ones—were also thought of as a dumping ground for films that the studios expected to perform badly: they were more about making a quick buck before anyone realized your movie was a bomb.

But then came Jaws. Encouraged by the blockbuster numbers for The Godfather in 1972—and buoyed by an unprecedented TV marketing campaign—Universal Pictures debuted Jaws in over 400 theaters on June 20, 1975. It was an immediate hit, eventually expanding to around 1,000 screens by the end of August and forever changing the course of pop culture.

Voiceover: “None of man’s fantasies of evil can compare with the reality of Jaws.” — Jaws TV Commercial

In many ways, Jaws doesn’t much resemble the summer movies it would inspire. It’s a movie that relies more on suspense than spectacle: forced to work around an uncooperative mechanical shark, director Steven Spielberg builds most of its terror by keeping Jaws off-screen.

For a summer movie, it’s also unusually character-based and talky, dependent on long stretches of dialogue between Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfus, and Robert Shaw—actors who don’t exactly fit our mold of modern summer movie stars. But Jaws was an experience: the collective terror that audiences shared created the kind of can’t-miss communal event that studios would seek to replicate for decades to come. And because of Jaws, they would concentrate most of their efforts on the summer.

Just two years later, Spielberg’s friend George Lucas solidified the reign of the summer movie season when 20th Century Fox released Star Wars on May 25, 1977, on just 32 screens— and only after forcing theater owners to book it if they wanted Fox’s presumed big summer hit: the 2-hour, 45-minute period piece, The Other Side of Midnight.

But Star Wars immediately shattered box-office records. With re-releases in the years to come, Star Wars became an annual summer ritual—a shared part of the national consciousness. And while there were sequels before this point, Star Wars made them into an event with the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back, defining the modern franchise saga where fans could look forward to rejoining their favorite characters across new summer adventures.

Ultimately Jaws and Star Wars were most influential not as films but as brands. Together, they helped to establish the summer dominance of the high-concept—a catchy, what-if premise that can be distilled into a marketing-friendly logline.

Voiceover: “But while some have looked for clues to the mystery, one man has found the way to bring the mystery back to life.” — Indian Jones, First Trailer

Jaws also kicked off the reign of the happy ending: characters surviving incredible odds, however unlikely, allowed them to return for sequels that enabled those franchises to live on indefinitely. Studios spent the ‘90s looking for “the next Lucas and Spielberg”—and high-concept summer blockbusters from James Cameron, Roland Emmerich, and M. Night Shyamalan briefly suggested they might fit the bill.

Beginning with 1996’s The Rock and lasting through the still-raging Transformers franchise, director Michael Bay became synonymous with a certain kind of summer movie that’s arguably been just as influential—one characterized by fast cars, frenetic action, shameless sex appeal, and liberally applied explosions.

But today, it is the brand that is king. After Iron Man launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the summer of 2008, this kind of endlessly renewable, the multi-movie franchise soon became the aspiration for every major studio.

Lex Luthor: “Shouldn’t we have a league of our own?” — Justice League

Even though these franchises are often helmed by talented directors, ultimately their filmmakers must all defer to the brand—or else. A few individual filmmakers remain powerful enough to command their own summer spots. But today’s typical summer-movie schedule is a battle of the brands.

The Endless Summer

When Disney revived the Star Wars franchise in 2015, it broke with tradition, debuting The Force Awakens on the weekend before Christmas.

Finn: “We’ll figure it out, we’ll use the Force!”

Han Solo: “That’s not how the force works.” — The Force Awakens

Even 2018’s Aquaman—a superhero-at-the-beach movie that screams “summer”—debuted in December. Many of our biggest sci-fi movies like Dune and the Avatar sequel are being scheduled for the winter holidays, while comic-book movies arrive as early as March or as late as October. Meanwhile, the summer has become a haven for indie sleepers, avant-garde horror, and heavyweight directors—the opposite of “turn off your brain” cinema.

With studios now replicating the summer movie’s success all year round, does the “summer movie” still mean what it once did? To continue to thrive, the “summer movie” may need to be redefined. Like Memorial Day barbecues, the last day of school, or Fourth of July fireworks, the summer movie gives our year a sense of order and predictability that, more than anything, we find comforting.

Pacey Witter: “What do you wanna do tonight? Wanna grab some pizza, hang out on the boat? Or I was thinking maybe we could go catch a bad summer movie at the $1.50 theatre.” — Dawson’s Creek, 4x1

This explains why summer movies often rely not only on established brands but also on reviving older, even largely out-of-fashion genres. Disaster movies were mostly a relic of the 1970s until 1996’s Independence Day came along. Swashbuckling, high-seas adventures weren’t exactly in vogue when the first Pirates of the Caribbean arrived in 2003.

Jurassic Park revived the giant monster movie—once a staple of 1950s American cinema—with a high-tech gloss. And time and again, the summer movie has brought the superhero back from the dead. While not all were hits, films like these have helped to keep important pieces of our cultural history alive.

This feeling of nostalgia is increasingly key to the summer movie’s survival—even to the survival of movie theaters. Despite the thousands of films available to stream from your couch, there’s still a longing for the kind of old-fashioned, big-screen experience that classic summer movies provide, one that makes seeing those films feel more like a shared moment in our lives.

It’s notable that, as theaters began to reopen amid the pandemic, many of them attempted to remind us of why we love going to the movies in the first place with screenings of retro summer favorites like Ghostbusters, The Goonies, and Back to the Future. June even saw Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and Jaws, the granddaddy of summer movies itself, battling for the number one box office spot.

We’ve also seen a resurgence of drive-in theaters, a once-bygone summer tradition that’s been revived by film fans who still believe moviegoing should be a communal event shared with others, even if socially distanced, like the outdoor screenings that have long popped up in cities around the country. This renewed interest in drive-ins speaks to our continued reverence for movies as a summer pastime. And it suggests one potential way forward for the summer movie—one more closely entwined with the specific atmosphere and feeling of those hotter months. Summer movies are, at their core, about the joy of film. Our relationship with the summer movie embodies our relationship with the entire moviegoing experience—just a little bit bigger.

Larry Vaughn: “This is gonna be one of the best summers we’ve ever had.” — Jaws