Film is Far from Dead: The Blockbuster’s Health in Summer ’16
Worried about the future of film after this summer? Calm yourself: This is just business as usual.

If you braved any major theater chain over the last few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that it was a time during which major movie studios let their audiences down—bigtime—dropping dud after dud in one of the most annually important boom periods for franchise rumpuses and colossal box office takes. If instead you chose to stay in your basement and catch up on your Netflix backlog instead, then you might’ve read an article or two about the summer release slate’s overarching badness, buttressed by the crappy movies and crappier grosses.
For the most part these articles are made up of charts and graphs, stats and dollar values. A few of them, like Wired’s sharp interrogation of the movies’ significance in modern popular culture, focus on feelings more than figures. (Could it be that unlimited access to handheld diversion, and the growing preference for analyzing a movie’s exterior controversies instead of the fucking movie, have obsolesced cinema as a platform for both substance and spectacle?) Taken individually, each piece reads merely as inquiry. Taken altogether, they make up a chorus of doomsaying—fthough the data crowns the summer of 2009, and not 2016, as the decade’s worst movie summer to date. (You think we have it bad today? Where were you for the ghastly parade of G.I. Joe, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator Salvation and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? You weren’t at the movies, that’s for damn sure.)
But none of this is news. As narratives go it isn’t even totally honest, in the context of both recent film history and 2016 specifically. Haven’t we been calling time of death on film since the post-2000 creative bloom on television sparked by The Sopranos, the Prometheus of TV’s modern golden age? There’s a famous Mark Twain misquote that suits the particulars of this ongoing saga quite nicely, though in the spirit of fairness, it’s hard to blame anybody for glancing back at 2016’s summer movies in the rearview and shuddering. Will you find worse entries in film’s vast catalog of stinkers, turkeys and garbage fires? You bet. But hoo boy, from X-Men: Apocalypse to Jason Bourne, Independence Day: Resurgence to Suicide Squad, this summer’s barrage of big budget misfires sucks pretty bad, too.
Figuring out why is a fool’s errand. The movie biz has been churning out junk since forever. Is the continued proliferation of junk in the present good enough cause for alarm? Bad movies are like relatively harmless car accidents, the kinds that leave milk trucks overturned on highways. Shed some tears for all the good it’ll do. Bad movies happen—all the time. In point of fact, bad movies are a part of movie culture just as much as good movies, so a spate of bad movies inflicted upon the moviegoing populace is normal. Summer ’16’s array of artistic disasters represent nothing more than an entertainment recession, then, much as 2014 and 2015 were times of prosperity by comparison. It should go without saying that we’d all be happier with more good movies than bad movies, but when Hollywood gives you franchising lemons, make franchising lemonade.
True, no one likes a slump, but slumps give us the opportunity to appreciate hot streaks. They’re also totally natural, and beyond that they’re expected. This is true as both a general rule and as a broad explanation for what went “wrong” with the movies over the summer (“wrong” referring almost strictly to subjective matters, a’la the quality of the movies themselves, over more objective issues, as in that pesky, boring, but necessary entity called “commercial success”). What happens when every major player in the business sculpts their release calendars around mega-budget franchise flicks, both new and resuscitated, when we’ve all been at peak franchise since 2012? Mediocrity becomes the standard, and the ultimate consequences of that rush to out-franchise other franchisees is reflected by both critical and commercial responses to 2016’s summer lineup.
But that’s one side of the industry, the side where the tentpoles, blockbusters, and mainstream releases reside, and if you pay attention to that side alone then the season falls in the range of “horrible to mediocre”: The Legend of Tarzan, Warcraft, Now You See Me 2, Ben-Hur, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, War Dogs, Alice Through the Looking Glass. As always, though, the movies have a second side, and on that side we find arthouse pictures such as The Wailing, Swiss Army Man, Love & Friendship, The Lobster, Gleason, Don’t Think Twice, The Fits, Weiner, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Chevalier (many of which made Paste’s Best Movies of 2016 So Far list), plus quieter studio efforts not based on comics and toy lines, like Central Intelligence and The BFG, all leading into August’s bounty of goodness—Little Men, Pete’s Dragon, Hell or High Water, Kubo and the Two Strings, Morris from America and Southside with You.