Movies
It seems like it was Christmas only yesterday, but the summer movie season starts this week. Traditionally, this movie season starts the first week of May, but because there’s so many movies out this summer Marvel decided to kick it off a week early with the release of Avengers: Infinity War on Friday.
For the longest time it seemed as if one summer would have a bunch of movies I wanted to see but the next would only have a few. And this would alternate year to year. But nowadays, for the last few years at least, each summer is filled with movies I want to see. Too many for me to see in theaters so I have to pick and choose. While there are some movies I’m dying to see and will certainly see in theaters, I’m looking at you Deadpool 2 and Solo, others like Ant Man might be ones I wait to come out on home media.
Even waiting for a home media release doesn’t mean waiting very long. A movie like Black Panther that was released at the beginning of February is set to be released on digital download just three months later at the start of May. For some movies I can wait 90 days to check them out.
I remember too when all the talk about the summer movie season used to be that it was filled with remakes and sequels. That really hasn’t been mentioned for some time now since it seems as if practically every big-budget summer movie the last few years is a sequel or based on some other pre-existing property.
Which brings me to a curiosity of movies as of late.
Over the last few years the most interesting movies being released are low-budget horror films like Get Out and, while I haven’t seen it yet, A Quiet Place. These movies cost a relative pittance to make, reportedly A Quiet Place cost $17 million and Get Out just $5 but have been earning huge returns at the box office. $255 million for Get Out and, as of this writing, more than $100 million for A Quiet Place. While these movies aren’t making anything near the amounts of cash a Marvel movie does, so far Black Panther has made more than $675 million alone, those little horror movies aren’t nearly as big a risk for the studios to take in developing them. The budget for Black Panther was a reported $200 million which means only a huge movie studio like Disney can afford to make them. When the budget for a movie is between $5 and $17 million like those horror movies the risk is a lot less and can be taken by a smaller studio.
And too, if a movie that cost between $5 and $17 million to make flops at the box office it probably doesn’t mark the death knell of the studio that made it, while the flop of a $200 million dollar movie might.
This has happened before. Back in the 1960s movie studios were producing a lot of big-budget movies then too. Movies like Doctor Doolittle and Paint Your Wagon were big-budget flops that decade which nearly bankrupted the movie studios then.
I’m not saying that any of the big-budget movies this summer in any way are going to bankrupt any movie studios — billions in box office returns the last few years testify to that — but it is something to thing about. That the movies that are crowd pleasers today might be the same type of movies that are the flops of tomorrow when tastes change as they always do.
Solo: A Star Wars Story TV spot
Deadpool 2
TV
GLOW season 2 video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwVOmTImfLA
The Reading & Watch List
- Diamond from the sky may have come from ‘lost planet’
- WWII Sub Rumored to Have Taken Top Nazis to South America Found Off Danish Coast
- Handmade Sketchbooks Teeming with Colorful Calligraphy, Diagrams, Sketches, and Travel Ephemera by José Naranja
- Violent Wind, Flying Debris: What Happens in a Plane Rupture
Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week
