As the world continued to burn and temperatures reached worrying highs, most of us decided to take refuge in the cinema this summer. It provided some relief for audiences, but even more so for the industry at large, with the season pushing past the magic $4bn mark to become the biggest since 2019, up 20% from last year. There were the expected hits (Spider-Man never misses), but there were also unprecedented breakouts (we were obsessed with Obsession) and surprise underperformers (are kids Minions-ed out?)
So at the end of a season with epic highs and cavernous lows, what lessons can Hollywood learn?
Spider-Man is the king of Hollywood
As soon as pundits are ready to admit that the superhero genre is actually really dead this time, a film comes out that almost immediately proves them wrong. Last summer, the underperformance of both Thunderbolts ($382m worldwide) and The Fantastic Four: First Steps ($521m worldwide) was somewhat offset by the decent start for James Gunn’s rebooted Superman ($624m worldwide), alarms temporarily quietened. But it was still a minor win for a type of film that used to enjoy major success, with the last superhero caper to cross the magic $1bn number notably being 2024’s snarky and self-deprecating Deadpool & Wolverine. Sirens were heard across Hollywood once again this summer as DC’s Supergirl crashed and burned back in June (a pitiful $126m worldwide from an estimated budget of $180m), but like clockwork, a miss was then followed by a hit and this time it was one of genuinely heroic proportions.
As July drew to a close, Spider-Man: Brand New Day premiered to sky-high numbers, a global opening weekend of almost $1bn leading to a current total of well over $2bn, by far the biggest film of the year to date as well as the second biggest superhero film of all time and the fourth biggest film ever, overtaking Titanic. It’s an obvious cause for celebration but one that comes with considerable asterisks. Spider-Man has long been a pioneering superhero character impervious to wider market trends. Sam Raimi’s 2002 original was the first film ever to make over $100m in its opening domestic weekend; even the lowest-performing sequel (2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2) made over $700m. Spider-Man: No Way Home became the highest-grossing film during the pandemic and now as Captain America, Supergirl and Thunderbolts flail, Spider-Man remains a considerable draw.
Marvel will surely be seeing this as a positive sign of things to come when Avengers: Doomsday hits in December (a film that has more riding on it than arguably anything else this year), but Spider-Man’s success continues to be his and his alone.
Gen Z horror profit margins are scary good
Horror has long been Hollywood’s favourite genre for the simple business fact of its profit margin. Typically cheap to produce and not reliant on expensive actors, even an underperformer rarely results in a great, superhero-sized loss. But this summer’s scariest hits were even cheaper and even more successful than the genre typically sees and both were used as proof of a changing of the guard, a new generation of film-makers now taking over.
While some of the hyperbole surrounding the success of Obsession and Backrooms, both directed by YouTube-trained twentysomethings, got a little bit overexcited (it’s not quite the new New Hollywood movement just yet), there was something undeniably invigorating about seeing two small films outgross far bigger summer options. Obsession came first with a budget of just $750k and after a modest opening weekend, word of mouth propelled it to one of the unlikeliest box office runs in recent memory, the first film since ET to increase its takings for three weekends in a row. It ended its run with a global total of $505m, making it the sixth biggest horror film of all time and the most successful original film of the 2020s. Soon after, A24’s less obviously audience-friendly horror Backrooms, based on the hit web series, became the company’s biggest-ever film with $394m worldwide from a $10m budget, while also making director Kane Parsons the youngest-ever film-maker to open at No 1.
As many soon pointed out, the success of two horror films in a landscape already oversaturated with them wasn’t a sign of some great sea change (imagine if two low-budget comedies achieved this, for example) but it did feel like a moment, one that energised a gen Z audience who were able to claim ownership of films made for them by people their age while still proving accessible to other age groups. The successes also came at a mostly underwhelming season for the horror genre elsewhere with more traditional options like Paramount’s Passenger ($31m worldwide), Hokum ($25m worldwide), Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man ($6m worldwide) and even Evil Dead Burn ($72m worldwide down from Evil Dead Rise’s $147m) paling in comparison with these two megahits. The wrong lessons will be learned with studios already buying up the rights to any old creepypasta that they can find, but ideally it encourages more chances to be taken and more rules to be somewhat broken. Hopefully next time in a different genre …
For franchises, too much is a bad thing
The declining interest in all things Marvel, Star Wars and DC should have taught Hollywood execs a thing or two about a lot of things but the biggest lesson should be one about the importance of scarcity. The more audiences were given of once carefully managed and commercially unbeatable brands, on both big and small screens, the less they felt compelled to keep coming back, an obvious case of more being too much.
It’s a thread that partly explains why a number of this summer’s biggest films underperformed: sequels, remakes or spin-offs rushed out before audiences had the chance to crave their return. The Despicable Me/Minions franchise had become the most reliable long-running animated series in Hollywood with over $6bn in the bank globally and the last two films in both intertwining sagas almost reaching $1bn each. But after six titles, the last of which was out in 2024, exhaustion set in and this past July’s Minions & Monsters has so far only made $513m and domestically is at almost half of what the last Minions film made. Last summer might have seen a promising start for the umpteenth Superman reboot but in a bizarrely bullish move, given the precarious state of the superhero genre, DC hurried out its Supergirl spin-off to be released less than a year later and the film was a bomb, making $126m, a disastrous amount that means Warner Bros is set to lose close to $120m and immediately killing the possibility of sequels. While The Mandalorian and Grogu might have been the first Star Wars film since 2019, in that seven-year period Disney flooded fans with almost 25 seasons of live-action and animated shows, and returning to the big screen with what seemed like an extended episode of a pre-existing series led to an underwhelming $345m worldwide, even less than what ridiculed spin-off Solo: A Star Wars Story made in 2018.
And, perhaps the most surprising flop of them all, was Disney’s live-action Moana, which has only just crossed $308m globally on a budget of $250m. The original animation made $687m in 2016 and became a major hit on Disney+, big enough to transform the follow-up from a streaming miniseries to a theatrical release, one that brought in over $1bn at the end of 2024. While it made a third film inevitable, it also made the live-action remake seem like an unnecessary and dated, piece of fan service.
At the same time, the franchises that paid dividends this summer gave fans something they had been missing. Long-awaited nostalgia-bait sequels were big with The Devil Wears Prada 2 making an astonishing $692m globally (over twice what the 2006 original made) and Scary Movie rising to $231m worldwide (almost three times the amount of the last sequel in 2013), while kids flocked to Toy Story 5 which made $1.1bn, the highest of any movie in the series to date (the last film was back in 2019). Audiences proved this summer that they were willing to repeatedly come out en masse to the movies but there still needed to be a real reason to do so.
Christopher Nolan is bigger than Steven Spielberg
As brands started to steal sway from the power of A-list actors and directors, we found ourselves losing a generation of stars who could be easily relied upon as a box office draw, both in front of and behind the screen. Admittedly the latter bracket has always been considerably smaller but still, until recently it was hard to name many contemporary equivalents to a Quentin Tarantino or a James Cameron. But with the success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in 2023 and then Ryan Coogler’s Sinners last year, it seemed like we had two newer film-makers who had finally proven themselves without the help of superhero IP. This summer, Nolan proved this again and then some with his biggest hit to date, an epic adaptation of The Odyssey.
It has now crossed $1.5bn worldwide making it the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever as well as Nolan’s biggest hit to date. While, yes, it was based on known IP, Homer was unlikely to be the driving force and even though it was cleverly stuffed with stars who had different generational appeal, none could be solely responsible for a hit of such scale. Nolan had already shown that he could turn a talky drama about the atom bomb into a $972m smash and now, at a time when even Gladiator II couldn’t reignite the swords-and-sandals genre, he’s found another unlikely summer success.
At the same time, arguably the most well-known commercial director alive Steven Spielberg stumbled with Disclosure Day, his original sci-fi thriller making an underwhelming $241m worldwide from a budget of $115m (reports suggested it needed closer to $300m just to break even). It was a more obviously commercial sell in many ways – Spielberg + aliens – but it just didn’t connect with audiences and after similarly glum returns for both The Fabelmans and West Side Story, it seems like the director’s golden touch might have faded or maybe it’s just time for the baton to pass. Similarly, at the tail end of the season, another older, one-time hitmaker Ridley Scott faced another flop with post-apocalyptic drama The Dog Stars, a film with a $110m budget that couldn’t even pass $20m in its global opening weekend. Maybe it’ll inspire both directors to try something a little different next.
Original comedies have no one laughing
It was supposed to be another Anyone But You but Will Gluck’s follow-up romcom One Night Only ended up as anything but, a calculated sleeper hit that failed to wake up its target younger audience. His Glen Powell-Sydney Sweeney match-up was a surprise hit at the end of 2023, adding a long tail to an underwhelming opening ($7m turned into $88m domestic which ballooned into $220m worldwide) and became the biggest R-rated comedy for almost a decade. But with a move from winter to summer, known leads to relative nobodies and a bizarre dystopian premise (what if sex was only legal for one night?), lightning failed to strike twice and after almost three weeks on release, the film has only crossed a damp $20m worldwide.
The failure of Sex Purge was not a great surprise to anyone paying attention (how a 30-second TV spot was supposed to convey that set-up is beyond me) but it came during another summer season that left original comedies out in the cold and spoke to a greater concern over a genre now mostly seen as safe for streaming only. Wider releases like The Breadwinner ($20m), Spa Weekend ($7.6m) and I Love Boosters ($9.7m) fizzled alongside medium-sized attempts like Power Ballad ($3.4m), Stop! That! Train! ($4.3m) and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass ($1.4m). And while nostalgia worked for Scary Movie and Prada, Super Troopers 3 opened to less than a third of the second film did.
There was one bright spot although just how bright it actually was remains under discussion. At this year’s Sundance, Olivia Wilde’s crowd-pleasing couples comedy The Invite was the subject of an intense bidding war, one of the only real sure things at a festival struggling through another off year. Despite a higher offer for a streaming release (something Wilde later referred to as a “bribe”), a theatrical rollout was seen as Paramount and A24 picked it up for an estimated $12m. By summer’s end it had made about $25m in the US and a total of $51m worldwide, a heartening result but given the buzz, reviews, stars attached and wide release, it wasn’t quite the slam-dunk some had hoped for (strong awards chances should help to make it an even more worthwhile purchase come end of year).
Studios have still been aggressively buying up buzzy comedy scripts so they’re not going away anytime soon (although next time Sex Purge’s writer comes a knocking, maybe keep that door closed) but still, without IP attached, it remains a risky genre theatrically. Like horror, it probably needs a gen Z transfusion to survive.
