List of the Top Summer Movies Since 'Jaws' Turned It Into Blockbuster Season in 1975
Jaws turns 50 this week, and its legacy of the summer movie blockbuster remains strong. The titles that have packed the most summer moviegoers into theaters since 1975 represent some of the best-known films of the last half-century, including five Star Wars movies, Pixar favorites like Toy Story 3 and Finding Nemo, superheroes galore, and both Top Gun films.
They also include some surprises and movies both less bombastic and less enduring. Combined, the top-earning summer films between 1975 and 2004 have more than 15 billion through the summer months–a figure not adjusted for inflation–according to the tracking firm Comscore. It's also worth noting that box-office tracking before 1981 was not as robust as it is today–and there was essentially no summer movie season in 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters across the country.
Here's a list of the top summer movie each year, along with the film's gross earnings from its release date through Labor Day, according to Comscore's data:
1975: Jaws $260 million
1976: The Omen $60.9 million
1977: Star Wars $221.3 million
1978: Grease $132.5 million
1979: Alien $79 million
1980: Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back $222.7 million
1981: Superman II $59.2 million
1982: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial $242 million
1983: Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi $222.3 million
1984: Ghostbusters $189.1 million
1985: Rambo: First Blood Part II $139 million
1986: Top Gun $131.3 million
1987: Beverly Hills Cop II $151 million
1988: Who Framed Roger Rabbit $130.7 million
1989: Batman $239 million
1990: Ghost $125 million
1991: Terminator 2: Judgment Day $183.1 million
1992: Batman Returns $159.8 million
1993: Jurassic Park $316.6 million
1994: The Lion King $262.3 million
1995: Batman Forever $181.4 million
1996: Independence Day $282 million
1997: Men in Black $235.1 million
1998: Armageddon $193 million
1999: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace $421.4 million
2000: Mission: Impossible II $214 million
2001: Shrek $263 million
2002: Spider-Man $403.7 million
2003: Finding Nemo $332.7 million
2004: Shrek 2 $436.7 million
2005: Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith $380 million
2006: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest $414 million
2007: Spider-Man 3 $336.5 million
2008: The Dark Knight $504.8 million
2009: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen $400.6 million
2010: Toy Story 3 $409 million
2011: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 $375.6 million
2012: Marvel's The Avengers $620.3 million
2013: Iron Man 3 $409 million
2014: Guardians of the Galaxy $281.2 million
2015: Jurassic World $647.4 million
2016: Finding Dory $482.9 million
2017: Wonder Woman $409.5 million
2018: Incredibles 2 $602.6 million
2019: The Lion King $523.6 million
2020: Tenet $20 million
2021: Black Widow $182.7 million
2022: Top Gun: Maverick $701.3 million
2023: Barbie $612.3 million
2024: Inside Out 2 $650.8 million
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Arabiya
21 hours ago
- Al Arabiya
Nero's Ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York Meet in `The Comet/Poppea' at Lincoln Center
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York were similar. That is the message of The Comet/Poppea, an intriguing combination of Monteverdi's 1643 opera L'incoronazione di Poppea and George E. Lewis' The Comet, a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. The mashup, conceived by director Yuval Sharon, began a five-performance run at Lincoln Center's Summer for the City on Wednesday night. First seen in Los Angeles last year, the American Modern Opera Company production unfolds on a turntable that completes a spin each 2 minutes 8 seconds. An audience of 290 is split into sections on opposite sides of the set on stage at the David Koch Theater, while the venue's 2,586 auditorium seats remain empty. 'It's an unstable ride over the course of 90 minutes, and the power of the interpretation is up to each and every spectator,' Sharon said. 'Whether you're on one side of the seating bank or the other, you're going to have a totally different experience, and you may miss a really important piece of action that your imagination is going to have to fill.' In Monteverdi's final opera, created to Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto, Nero exiles his wife Ottavia, leaving him free to crown Poppea empress. Lewis composed The Comet to librettist Douglas Kearney's adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois' dystopian eight-page 1920 short story, in which a working-class Black man, Jim (Davóne Tines), and a society white woman, Julia (Kiera Duffy), believe they are the only survivors of a comet and can join to form a prejudice-free society. Their aspirations collapse when they learn people outside New York remained alive and segregation was unconquerable. 'People can make the leap between the music they're hearing and the kinds of tensions that are inherent to modern life and the tensions that the opera presents and the text presents, particularly around the dystopian aspect of white supremacy,' Lewis said. 'White supremacy is a kind of dystopia, and it's a dystopia that we continue to live with today.' Different styles for different eras. Mimi Lien's two-sided set, illuminated strikingly by John Torres, is tiered with a bath at the top level on the Roman portion and a red Art Deco restaurant evoking the Rainbow Room on the other, where Jim and Julia find three dead bodies slumped. 'Jim is confronted with what it means to be the only man left alive, what it newly means to be a Black man allowed into spaces he wasn't before, but then have that dream crushed by the reality of Julia also inhabiting that space,' said Tines, a commanding presence as Jim and the smaller role of Mercury. The Comet/Poppea debuted at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last June and also was performed with a student cast in Philadelphia in November. It is part of a Run AMOC* festival of 12 productions at Lincoln Center that include 10 New York premieres. Friday's performance can be viewed on a live stream on Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube channels. Planning, writing, and funding took years. Sharon first discussed the project in 2018 with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings Nero and Julia's father, a stuffed shirt dressed like Mr. Monopoly. 'It fell apart so many times,' Costanzo said. 'First the pandemic came, and so all of our plans we'd put together were dashed. Then we had one co-producer who was giving a lot of money, and they pulled out. Then we got another co-producer to put that much money in again, and they pulled out.' Sharon had met Lewis at a 2018 Columbia University conference and approached him with the idea of concentrating on Poppea's upward mobility and creating a secondary story 'to complicate and to make a mess of this idea of authoritarianism.' Sharon trimmed Poppea to its essence. Lewis' music, filled with dissonance and a snippet of jazz, mixes with the Monteverdi's baroque, which Jim first hears from the restaurant jukebox. 'The conception was one in which you knew from the beginning that there are moments of overlap, there are moments of exchange of sequentiality,' Lewis said. 'It could stand alone by itself, ' The Comet ' certainly.' Lincoln Center is presenting a more ambitious offering of classical events after drawing criticisms in the first three seasons of Summer for the City that emerged from the pandemic. There are 266 scheduled events from June 11 through Aug. 9. Programs are set to include jazz, Latin music, R&B, Broadway, pop, Caribbean dance, and more.
Asharq Al-Awsat
21 hours ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Movie Review: From Bumper to Bumper, ‘F1' Is Formula One Spectacle
The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski's 'F1,' a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor. Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in 'Top Gun: Maverick,' has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on 'Maverick,' takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping score. And, again, our central figure is an older, high-flying cowboy plucked down in an ultramodern, gas-guzzling conveyance to teach a younger generation about old-school ingenuity and, maybe, the enduring appeal of denim. But whereas Tom Cruise is a particularly forward-moving action star, Brad Pitt, who stars as the driving-addicted Sonny Hayes in 'F1,' has always been a more arrestingly poised presence. Think of the way he so calmly and half-interestedly faces off with Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino's 'Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.' In the opening scene of 'F1,' he's sleeping in a van with headphones on when someone rouses him. He splashes some water on his face and walks a few steps over to the Daytona oval, where he quickly enters his team's car, in the midst of a 24-hour race. Pitt goes from zero to 180 mph in a minute. Sonny, a long-ago phenom who crashed out of Formula One decades earlier and has since been racing any vehicle, even a taxi, he can get behind the wheel of, is approached by an old friend, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) about joining his flagging F1 team, APX. Sonny turns him down at first but, of course, he joins and 'F1' is off to the races. The title sequence, exquisitely timed to the syncopated rhythms of Zimmer's score, is a blistering introduction. The hotshot rookie driver Noah Pearce (Damson Idris) is just running a practice lap, but Kosinski, his camera adeptly moving in and out of the cockpit, uses the moment to plunge us into the high-tech world of Formula One, where every inch of the car is connected to digital sensors monitored by a watchful team. Here, that includes technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) and Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia), the team's chief. Verisimilitude is of obvious importance to the filmmakers, who bathe this very Formula One-authorized film in all the sleek operations and globe-trotting spectacle of the sport. That Apple, which produced the film, would even go for such a high-priced summer movie about Formula One is a testament to the upswing in popularity of a sport once quite niche in America, and of the halo effects of both the Netflix series 'Formula 1: Drive to Survive' and the seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, an executive producer on 'F1.' Whether 'F1' pleases diehards, I'll leave to more ardent followers of the circuit. But what I can say definitively is that Claudio Miranda knows how to shoot it. The cinematographer, who has shot all of Kosinski's films as well as wonders like Ang Lee's 'Life of Pi,' brings Formula One to vivid, visceral life. When 'F1' heads to the big races, Miranda is always simultaneously capturing the zooming cars from the asphalt while backgrounding it with the sweeping spectacle of a course like the UK's fabled Silverstone Circuit. OK, you might be thinking, so the racing is good; is there a story? There's what I'd call enough of one, though you might have to go to the photo finish to verify that. When Sonny shows up, and rapidly turns one practice vehicle into toast, it's clear that he's going to be an agent of chaos at APX, a low-ranking team that's in heavy debt and struggling to find a car that performs. This gives Pitt a fine opportunity to flash his charisma, playing Sonny as an obsessive who refuses any trophy and has no real interest in money, either. The flashier, media-ready Noah watches Sonny's arrival with skepticism, and the two begin more as rivals than teammates. Idris is up to the mano-a-mano challenge, but he's limited by a role ultimately revolving around and reducing to a young Black man learning a lesson in work ethic. A relationship does develop, but 'F1' struggles to get its characters out of the starting blocks, keeping them closer to the cliches they start out as. The actor who, more than anyone, keeps the momentum going is Condon, playing an aerodynamics specialist whose connection with Pitt's Sonny is immediate. Just as she did in between another pair of headstrong men in 'The Banshees of Inisherin,' Condon is a rush of naturalism. If there's something preventing 'F1' from hitting full speed, it's its insistence on having its characters constantly voice Sonny's motivations. The same holds true on the race course, where broadcast commentary narrates virtually every moment of the drama. That may be a necessity for a sport where the crucial strategies of hot tires and pit-stop timing aren't quite household concepts. But the best car race movies — from 'Grand Prix' to 'Senna' to 'Ferrari' — know when to rely on nothing but the roar of an engine. 'F1' steers predictably to the finish line, cribbing here and there from sports dramas before it. (Tobias Menzies plays a board member with uncertain corporate goals.) When 'F1' does, finally, quiet down, for one blissful moment, the movie, almost literally, soars. It's not quite enough to forget all the high-octane macho dramatics before it, but it's enough to glimpse another road 'F1' might have taken.
Asharq Al-Awsat
21 hours ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Think You Know 'Jaws'? Test Your Knowledge with this Trivia Ahead of the Movie's 50th Anniversary
Friday marks the 50th anniversary of 'Jaws.' It remains one of the most beloved and rewatched movies of all time. But how good is your knowledge of the some of lore surrounding Steven Spielberg's 1975 masterpiece? Read on and see how much you know about 'Jaws.' What was the nickname given to the shark? Spielberg named his mechanical shark 'Bruce,' after his attorney, Bruce Ramer. Where did the title come from? When author Peter Benchley's 1974 book was going to print, he needed to choose a title. He has juggled various titles — 'Leviathan Rising,' 'Silent Fall' — before, at the last minute, choosing 'Jaws.' What did it mean? Benchley, himself, wasn't sure, he told his editor, but it was short. What's the origin of the iconic movie poster? The image of the rising shark came from the cover of the novel's paperback edition, illustrated by Roger Kastel. For his painting, Kastel went to the American Museum of Natural History to photograph a great white shark from a diorama that was laying on an easel. What was the inspiration for Amity? Though Spielberg shot 'Jaws' on Martha's Vineyard, off Cape Cod, it was the neighboring island, Nantucket, that inspired Benchley's novel. He has spent time fishing there with his father. In the book, the fictional Amity is on the south shore of Long Island. Who was first attached to direct 'Jaws'? Dick Richards was initially in line to direct the film, but producer Richard D. Zanuck said he lost the job after, in a meeting, repeatedly referring to the shark as a whale. How old was Spielberg when he began the project? 26. Who sought but was turned down the role of Brody? Charlton Heston wanted to play the Amity Island police chief, but Spielberg instead cast Roy Scheider. What's the name of Quint's boat? The Orca. Not coincidentally, two years after the massive success of 'Jaws,' a 1977 ripoff about a killer whale was released titled 'Orca.' What led to the shark often malfunctioning? Salt water. The shark, built by special effects artist Bob Mattey, would get corroded by the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean, leaving it unusable for times – particularly early in the filmmaking. Spielberg pivoted and instead doesn't show the shark until well into the film, an approach that ultimately led to a far more suspenseful film. Spielberg once estimated that Bruce's mechanical delays added $175 million to the movie's box office. How long into 'Jaws' does the shark fully appear on screen? It's not until one hour and 21 minutes into the movie that we really see the shark. Was the movie's most iconic line scripted? No, Schieder adlibbed 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.' Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, though, has said the line had been percolating on set. The size of the barge carrying equipment and craft services was often slighted by the crew who felt producers weren't spending enough. Gottlieb told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016: 'It became a catchphrase for any time anything went wrong – if lunch was late or the swells were rocking the camera, someone would say, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.'' What disaster was Quint a survivor of? The sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the US Navy cruiser torpedoed by a Japanese submarine during World War II. Quint's lengthy and memorably speech in the film wasn't in the novel but was, according to Spielberg, penned by the uncredited screenwriter John Milius. Spielberg wanted a backstory to why Quint hated sharks so much. Though debate has continued over the years over who wrote the monologue, everyone has agreed Shaw synthesized it, and deserves most of the credit for the scene's power. Does Spielberg appear in 'Jaws?' The director isn't seen in the film but his voice is heard. During the finale of the film when Quint is readying the harpoon, it's Spielberg's voice on the radio. He says: 'This is Amity point light-station to Orca. Orca, come in.' Spielberg shows up in a couple other ways, too. A clarinetist in high school, he plays briefly on Williams' score. And Brody's dogs were Spielberg's cocker spaniels, Elmer and Zalman. (For his part, Benchley makes a cameo as a TV reporter during the July 4th beach scene.) How far over schedule did 'Jaws' run? The production was scheduled for 55 days but took 159 days to complete. The budget also nearly tripled, to $9 million, plus $3 million more in post-production. Though 'Jaws' become the prototype summer movie, it was originally expected to open around Christmastime the year before. What was 'Jaws' rated? Though it caused some controversy, the Motion Picture Association of America gave 'Jaws' a 'PG' rating. At the time, there was no PG-13 rating. (That only began in 1984, with 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,' after a handful of other Spielberg productions, including 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' and 'Gremlins' led to the new category.) Jack Valenti, then-president of the MPAA, defended the rating by arguing that ''Jaws' involved nature's violence, rather than man's violence against man,' Valenti said. 'This is the same kind of violence as in 'Hansel and Gretel.' Children might imitate other kinds of violence, but not the kind seen in 'Jaws.'' The movie's poster carried the warning: 'MAY BE TOO INTENSE FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN.' What did 'Jaws' lose best picture to at the Academy Awards? 'Jaws' was nominated for four Oscars and won three: best sound, best editing and best score for John Williams. The competition for best picture, though, was fierce. The nominees, alongside 'Jaws,' where 'Dog Day Afternoon,' 'Barry Lyndon,' 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' and 'Nashville.' The winner was 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'
