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.
