Back in the day when I was a kid, going to watch a movie in summer vacations use to be one of the greatest delights of the entire summer. Summer classics were usually known to be fun and uplifting, unlike what cinema offers now- dark and serious.
Summer time in Hollywood is analogous to Eid releases in India. But this year, it turned out to be a bit of a downer for many Hollywood studios and here’s why.
Underwhelming Response Even After Tremendous Publicity
This year, the Fourth of July holiday witnessed the release of Independence Day: Resurgence, The Legend of Tarzan, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, all three of which gave an underwhelming response at the box office.
Not to mention even before Fourth of July, movies such as Captain America and Finding Dory couldn’t save the collections from drowning. Even movies such as Suicide Squad which performed quite well at the box office, couldn’t get rid of the curse that’s been casted over Hollywood this season.
The Plausible Cause For Such Poor Response
To put it gently, there were a tonnes of tent-pole movies going around in theatres this summer. Tent pole are movies that likely to cast a series of prequels or sequels. And there isn’t any shortage of such movies.
A number of movies released this year were some sort of reboot or a remake. For example: Captain America, X Men: Apocalypse, Alice Through The Looking Glass, Now You See Me 2, Independence Day: Resurgence, Ben-Hur and many more, believe you me the list is quite long.
Without the presence of originality and newness to the characters, the possibility of losing interest in existing storylines and characters increases twofold. I mean shouldn’t they have made a big budget TV series on X-Men if there were gonna be 9 X-Men movies in 16 years?
Availability Of Better Alternatives
Talking about TV series, this year much of the needed summer excitement was brought in by the small screen. The two Nextflix original series ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Narcos’ have completely taken the entire TV experience on another level.
The TV show ‘The Night Of’ was also lauded for its spectacular storyline and addressing a debatable issue of Islamophobia in a completely new light. Perhaps, this is where the audience found itself dipping in for new enticement.
The franchise fatigue caused with these rehashed movies is quite incident on the performance of rather lower budgeted movies such as ‘Don’t Breathe’ and ‘Lights Out’, both of which were produced under 10 million and went onto do a collection of 88.8 million and 141.9 million respectively.
The summer collections of this year have been the lowest in the past 15 years of Hollywood, kind of like a wake up call for the producers to actually stop rehashing these reboots/remakes and make way for more elaborative and engaging movies with significant character development unlike already established superheroes saving the world, once again.
If you liked reading this, you might wanna check out:
http://edtimes.in/2016/08/harley-quinn-saved-suicide-squad-from-being-the-next-batmanvssuperman-ed-review/
