Could this be the strangest summer movie season ever? I certainly can’t remember many stranger. On the one hand, cinemas in both the US and UK have enjoyed a significant rebound from the pandemic dog days of 2020 and 2021. That was inevitable to a degree, given that cinema-going in that period was either prohibited or at least highly discouraged. Still, 2022’s bounce-back has not been insignificant, with a number of movies posting numbers that would have been considered successful even before the pandemic. Chief among those is the gargantuan Top Gun: Maverick, which is gunning for the top five US box office earners of all time, having just flown past Avengers: Infinity War to take the sixth spot. It’s not alone in posting impressive numbers, though – Minions: The Rise of Gru, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Jordan Peele’s Nope, Ethan Hawke horror film The Black Phone and even Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic have all performed admirably.
But on the other hand … there have been no movies! Contrary to the belief that cinemas would receive a bounty of delayed 2020 and 2021 releases this summer, there has instead been a peculiar drought. Check in on the listings for any week over the past month or two, and beyond the occasional tentpole release you would have struggled to find too much of note. Things have got so bad that this week’s highest grosser at the UK box office is a concert film of violinist/conductor Andre Rieu, while next week’s US box office is expected to be topped by a rerelease of Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film first seen in cinemas in 2021.
If part of the great 2022 summer movie shortfall is due to a few key releases being bumped back to Christmas or beyond (or in the case of poor old Batgirl, shelved altogether), a bigger factor is surely streaming, which has caused the shortening of the theatrical window (the gap between a film’s cinema and home entertainment releases) or seen films bypass cinemas altogether. Take a film like The Gray Man: a megabudget action thriller starring two bankable names in Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans and directed by the Russo Brothers of the Avengers movies repute. It’s the sort of film that in years gone by would have sat atop the box office for weeks on end. Instead its distributors Netflix yanked it from cinemas after a week, in order to maximise eyeballs on its streaming release. That tactic seems to have worked nicely (a sequel is already in the works), but isn’t much help to a cinema industry currently starved for content.
Even when films have stuck to the traditional release model, they have, in some cases, been met with apathy from audiences used to streaming’s new normal. Would a movie like Toy Story spinoff Lightyear, boasting the Pixar imprimatur, have fizzled so badly at the box office in a world where viewers hadn’t been conditioned to films heading straight to Disney+? You suspect not. In this environment, you can hardly be surprised that cinema chains are happier to line up wall-to-wall screenings of movies they know are guaranteed bankers – Top Gun, Doctor Strange – rather than take a risk on an unknown quantity (bad news, mid- and low-budget films). After all, for these chains the situation is life or death: just look at the plight of Cineworld.
So after this strange summer of cinema, the stakes for autumn feel high, and again the picture looks mixed. On the one hand the pantry looks far better stocked than in the summer, with a mix of big-budget and awards-friendly films to look forward to – Avatar and Black Panther sequels among those in the former camp, Spielberg’s family drama The Fabelmans and She Said – about the journalists that brought down Harvey Weinstein – in the latter. The streaming services seem to be a little more willing to play ball too, with Netflix releasing Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Knives Out sequel Glass Onion for a month in cinemas before it hits their platform.
Even so, there are still so many variables to watch out for: people’s willingness to spend money on cinema tickets during an energy crisis in the UK; that same energy crisis potentially curbing the ability of cinemas – particular independent screens – to operate; the continued shift towards streaming over the multiplex. It’s a tricky time for the industry – here’s hoping they survive it.
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