Summer (or at least the movie summer season) is here and with that brings short skirts, blasting air conditioning, and my 312 pound neighbor Morty lounging around shirtless in his kiddie pool. Since I have two kids it is much harder to find time to head out to the local multiplex and catch a summer film. It’s even harder to find time to join Morty in the pool.
Theaters will be overrun with Muggles on July 15th, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince will rake in tons of dough.
Every week during the May – September time frame Hollywood studios release big blockbusters hoping to grab your hard earned (and in a lot of cases now, unemployed) dollars. It sometimes seems like a jigsaw puzzle with studios blocking off release dates years in advance. Marvel has already declared that The Avengers will be released on May 4th, 2012. Oh crap, I think I already have a dentist appointment that day with someone who hasn’t even entered dental school yet! Other companies then back off those dates so as not to create unwanted competition. It’s kind of like wolves that mark their territory with pee, except with less animals and urine. With so many films and so few summer weeks, not every movie will end up being a hit. Remember last year’s Speed Racer? It had the May 9th, 2008 weekend all to itself and the film still didn’t open well and ended up being a bigger flop than AFI’s Ed Wood retrospective.
So which upcoming films will be hits and which won’t? We’ve already seen Wolverine (despite its poor reviews) rake in $87 million over its opening weekend, but that was the first weekend in May which always turns out hits. To prove the point, check out May 7th, 2004 when Van Helsing , a film so bad it made my eyes bleed, managed to open to over $51 million. Let’s take a look at upcoming summer movies and figure out which will be hits and which won’t be remembered the Monday after they open.
May 15th will see Tom Hanks return as Robert Langdon in Angels and Demons . I’m still trying to figure out the previous Langdon film, The Da Vinci Code. Not because there were too many codes to understand, but Ron Howard made such a mess out of that film that I was wondering if the Academy would ask for their Oscar back. That mess still managed to gross over $750 million worldwide. So expect A&D to be a huge hit especially since Hanks got rid of that funny haircut.
Comedy will be leading the way on June 5th with The Hangover , a relatively inexpensive film from Todd Phillips and Land of the Lost, a big budget remake of an old TV show starring Will Ferrell. I’m thinking Hangover is going to be the surprise hit of the summer, and could make over $130 million. At the same time, Land of the Lost is screaming bomb bigger than Cutthroat Island. Will Ferrell’s Semi Pro proved he’s able to fail at the box office and do any of his fans even remember the old TV show? Count on Will to come up with some clever marketing ploy on Funny or Die though.
Sacha Baron Cohen returns in tight pants on July 10 with Bruno . It’s basically the same idea was Borat except the buzz on this film is that there are more fake set ups. The Cohen trick is old at this point and many people will think it’s a retread of Borat so don’t expect it to make as much cash, but the film will still be shocking enough to bring in people so expect a decent size hit.
Theaters will be overrun with Muggles on July 15th, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince will rake in tons of dough. Even though the series has been finished in print these films are the only sure thing happening at the box office these days. Warner Bros. could release Harry Potter Grows a Mustache and the film would still gross over $300 million.
At the end of July is Judd Apatow’s Funny People starring Adam Sandler. Sandler and Apatow together is comedy gold (and in this economy that’s worth more than real gold except you can’t use it in teeth fillings). Expect both groups of fans to show up and this film will earn more than Knocked Up. Sandler will bring his male teen audience and Apatow has the date night older crowd.
Finally, even though the trailer looks pretty silly, I expect G.I. Joe to rake in big box office. There is no other PG-13 action film being released anywhere near it (Harry Potter does not count), so count on those young boys to flock to this as though it were a somewhat fuzzy nude side shot of Pamela Anderson they came across online.
This isn’t all the films being released and these are just my own ideas. There’s a very good chance I could be totally wrong because as William Goldman once said, in Hollywood “Nobody knows anything”.
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