The best and worst summers at the movies

In 2008, cinema still loved superheroes, but the “cinematic universe” concept hadn’t been developed for them yet. Hence we could get not just a great DC movie—maybe the greatest—in Christopher Nolan’s , but also a good Marvel movie at long last with , and a completely original superhero in Peter Berg’s . You could arguably throw in an animated one too, as kicked off the most successful DreamWorks animated franchise since . Though it didn’t spawn sequels, Pixar’s earned the company some of its best reviews ever, concealing an anti-consumerist eco-message behind a tear-jerking tale of two adorable robots in love.Less noticed at the time was the first Star Wars feature film since the prequels, and the only one released by Warner Bros.—. Mostly mocked when it came out, the film’s teenage girl protagonist would turn out to be a pretty big deal, even as her slangy catchphrases annoyed some of the fans. That character, Ahsoka Tano, is now beloved and has her very own live-action show. That summer, though, female audiences proved more into and the movie. Male-skewing comedies scored big too, with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly playing , Seth Rogen getting high AF in , and Adam Sandler going weirder than usual in .Also released in the summer of 2008: , , and .

Any time anyone complains that today’s blockbusters are soulless, samey, hollow effects movies, force them to sit through the unholy trinity of , , and . They’ll be begging for or Black Widow long before Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt drive into the first storm. Remembered mainly for their respective trailer-friendly moments: a flying cow, Tom Cruise on wires, and the White House exploding—these three truly represent the mindless junk that existed before Kevin Feige started actually caring a bit about story. Insulting to one’s intelligence and with a tenuous grasp at best on science and technology, all three build up to admittedly impressive set pieces with really long stretches of dullness, and in the case of Mission: Impossible, a fandom-betraying plot twist the movie has to show twice to make sure you get it. With , later that same summer, Michael Bay showed them all how it’s done.Elsewhere, Shaquille O’Neal starred as , and the monumentally unfunny filmmaking duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer kicked off a decade-plus string of laugh-free parody movies with , directed by Friedberg’s dad.Also released in the summer of 1996 were the semi-redemptive and .

A summer of disaster movies in every sense of the word, this was the year we got dueling asteroid flicks, as Mimi Leder’s went up against Michael Bay’s . One was a more sensitive, philosophical take that killed off its leads; the other was bombastic, ridiculous destruction that also featured Ben Affleck attempting to wax lyrical about Animal Crackers while an awful Aerosmith song played. When either movie gets mentioned today, it’s usually ironic, or as a celebration of Affleck’s DVD commentary mocking his own work. Then came Roland Emmerich’s , a movie in which a creature that neither looked nor acted much like Godzilla encountered Matthew Broderick and then disappeared for an hour before meeting a King Kong-like fate, shot by airplanes on the Brooklyn Bridge. Toho, the studio that released the original in 1954, hated it so much they had the real Godzilla take out the impostor in record time in a subsequent film. Elsewhere, Warren Beatty returned to the director’s chair for the first time since with Bulworth, a misguided attempt to mock political correctness—or wokeness, in today’s parlance—that’s best left forgotten.Also released in the summer of 1998 that proved beach season wasn’t a total write-off: and .

Anyone remember that time they cast Jake Gyllenhaal as the ? No, really, that was 2010's big Memorial Day movie, and one of the few that summer that wasn’t a sequel or remake, though it was a video-game movie, with all that implies. The rest of the season was filled with the likes of Tim Burton’s , , , , , , M. Night Shyamalan’s , , , , , and .On the plus side, also released in the summer of 2010 were , , and .

One might think the first year of the COVID pandemic would have been the worst, but among the tiny handful of releases, the ratio of quality entries was strong in 2020, with the likes of , , , , and .2021, on the other hand, was a year of secondary sequels and reboots: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and offered familiar leftovers which didn’t exactly cry out to be seen on the big screen at the risk of one’s health. Also released in the summer of 2021: David Lowery’s and M. Night Shyamalan’s , which both stood out as directorial visions really trying to shake things up.

No article on movie summers is complete without mentioning 1975, since it started the whole seasonal shebang with . (Although 1973's also helped lay the pipe for the beach season blockbuster).Otherwise, the summer was a mixed bag that—on the plus side—gave us Robert Altman’s , Woody Allen’s , and . But it also had many tedious sequels, including , , and . Meanwhile, Disney, years before becoming a dependable seasonal powerhouse, offered up and the somewhat racist . (Although that missing dinosaur did end up in Star Wars as the Krayt dragon skeleton on Tatooine, so it wasn’t a loss for everyone.)A true mixed bag of a summer, but, as Humphrey Bogart didn’t quite tell Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, “we’ll always have Jaws.”

If Jaws lit the fuse for the summer blockbuster, Star Wars sent it into the stratosphere. Had nothing else been released that summer, the beach season of 1977 would have at least been awarded Honorable Mention. Before Star Wars became , it kicked off a six-movie trend of owning Memorial Day; one that continued until Disney bought Lucasfilm and decided December worked better. Star Wars crowded out William Friedkin’s at the time, though that has since been re-appraised, and paid tribute to in an episode of The Mandalorian. , also that summer, remains arguably the definitive Roger Moore James Bond film.Also released in the summer of 1977, the Jaws rip-offs  and , plus a trifecta of bad sequels, , , and .