The 25 best summer movies ever made

Globe and Mail

15-05-2025

In his new book The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, journalist Chris Nashawaty convincingly argues that one particular six-week stretch in the 1980s not only established the careers of today's most iconic filmmakers but defined the very nature of that holiest of Hollywood grails: the summer movie season, where high art and higher commerce commingle to create something extraordinary.
While studios have since stretched the definition of when the summer movie season does and doesn't begin – when Universal shifted the release of its fifth Fast & Furious film in 2011 from June to April, the studio's marketing spots trumpeted the slogan, 'Summer Starts Early' – the best summer movies are not only a matter of season but also sensibility. At its best, a summer movie offers a contagious and impulsive energy, a viewing experience during which, just like the best long and sweltering July day, absolutely anything can happen.
For the purposes of this entirely subjective (but also 110-per-cent unarguable) list, each of the 25 Best Summer Movies Ever had to not only be released in that hot and hazy stretch between Victoria Day and Labour Day, but also carry a distinctly summery vibe: scorching and sweaty, endless and electric, and just a little bit magical. So, to quote the counsellors of Ontario's most infamous summer playground, Camp North Star: Are you ready for the summer?
In the Before Times of 2019, Christopher Nolan's Tenet was just a movie – a highly anticipated one, given Nolan's imprimatur, but still, just a movie. But when it was finally released in the depths of August, 2020, the first Hollywood movie to tempt audiences back to the multiplex following the pandemic's global shutdown, Tenet felt more like a symbol. Of hope, yeah, but also something more stubbornly admirable. While Tenet didn't save 2020 (or 2021, or 2022), the epic about two dapper secret agents soulmates trying to stitch together the space-time continuum has since grown exponentially in reputation and significance. It is mostly incomprehensible, but it also totally rocks. And without Nolan's intransigence in insisting it get into theatres during that dire summer of 2020, we might have faced a backward-engineered future much like Tenet's own: one of despair and decay, instead of popcorn and profit.
Directed by Christopher Nolan. On-demand via Apple TV, Amazon
You Might Also Like: Inception (2010), Nolan's first big summer-season head-scratcher.
Today, a big-screen comedy is as rare a sighting as a Cameron Diaz movie (she semi-retired in 2014). But the comedic landscape around the mid-1990s wasn't especially encouraging, either, with many studios desperately trying to revive ancient properties (McHale's Navy, Mr. Magoo, Flubber, George of the Jungle) rather than push the boundaries. Then along came Mary. While the Farrelly brothers' raunchy rom-com wouldn't shock a sixth grader today, the film pushed all the right buttons in 1998, its ejaculation gags and desire to punish Ben Stiller's genitals repackaging the admirably puerile shock of Animal House into something fresh. There's Something About Mary wasn't just the start of a new kind of cinematic comedy – the Judd Apatow era would simply not exist without it – but also marked the beginning of the end, too.
Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly. Streaming on Disney+ (remarkably)
You Might Also Like: American Pie (1999), which dialled up the sexual-deviancy factor to 350 degrees.
Aside from a seemingly one-off Toy Story sequel in 1999, Pixar didn't do sequels. But that changed when the animation giant delivered this presumably final Toy Story chapter in the summer of 2010. Not only did the third film deliver one of the most emotional climaxes in any Disney movie ever – a perfect 'put away childish things' moment that smashed the hearts of kids and kids at heart – but its success paved the way for Pixar to evolve into (for better or worse) a true franchise factory. Today, it's not summer without a Pixar sequel or spin-off. Mark your calendar for June, 2026, when Toy Story 5 improbably arrives to dominate both the multiplex and merch aisles.
Directed by Lee Unkrich. Streaming on Disney+
You Might Also Like: The Lion King (1994), whose resuscitation of Disney's traditional-animation arm paved the way for Pixar's dominance.
Father to a murdered son? Yes. Husband to a murdered wife? Also, yeah. But Maximus Decimus Meridius was more than that. As embodied by a ferociously committed Russell Crowe, the Roman general anchored an immortal entertainment that screamed 'summer' so loud that the entire Colosseum could hear the battle cry. Ridley Scott's film might not have revived the swords-and-sandals genre – instead, it acts as a decades-delayed final chapter to the likes of Ben-Hur and Spartacus. But it does land as a historical epic which so blatantly pleases the crowd in all the right ways. Thumbs up, no matter the opinion of Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus.
Directed by Ridley Scott. Streaming on Paramount+
You Might Also Like: Conan the Barbarian (1982) is another flick that disproves the maxim that the pen (in this case the screenplay) is mightier than the sword.
The birth of Tom Cruise, saviour of moviegoing, began smack in the middle of the summer of 1983, when the sunglass-clad star shimmied across his parents' posh suburban Chicago home to the warbling of Bob Seger. But Paul Brickman's Tangerine Dream-scored comedy-cum-thriller was also a brash act of summer-movie subversion. The wish-fulfilment fantasy about a high-school senior who sleeps with a beautiful prostitute only to quickly slide into the criminal underworld is smarter, sharper and more satirical about Ronald Reagan's America than its crass horny-teenager predecessors (Class, Private Lessons, My Tutor). It is the perfect wild and wet dream for a steamy and sordid summer night.
Directed by Paul Brickman. Streaming on Crave
You Might Also Like: Cocktail (1988) is far from Cruise's finest hour, but it evokes a certain (disguised) Toronto-in-the-summer energy that'll convert even the most Canadian of thermometers to Fahrenheit.
The obvious choice for a summer horror movie might be the original Friday the 13th, or a summer-camp slasher like 1983's Sleepaway Camp or the more disturbing 1981 cheapie The Burning. But neither of those films are exactly, well, good. Whereas Tobe Hooper's aggressively unsettling The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a cinematic touchstone, its distinct late-summer setting (Aug. 18, 1973, as narrator John Larroquette informs us) amongst the wilds of the Lone Star State offering a uniquely sweaty, sun-dappled nightmare. (I'm also making one big exception to my above-stated rule, given that Hooper's film was released in the fall.)
Directed by Tobe Hooper. On-demand via Apple TV
You Might Also Like: Poltergeist (1982), Hooper's other big summer scare-fest.
Initially, Universal didn't have much faith in this small US$36-million 'programmer' – what studio execs assumed would be a quick and dirty cars-and-chicks movie intended to tide the studio over during spring break. But after holding a now-legendary test screening in the L.A. suburbs in early 2001 – during which audience members responded to the high-octane stunts and brotastic chemistry between stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker by rushing out of the theatre to rev their engines and spin donuts in the parking lot – Universal moved director Rob Cohen's street-racing flick to June, where it blew away the competition. Nine sequels and one spin-off later, the series is now the eighth most popular franchise of all time (US$7.3-billion and counting), and a true summertime sensation.
Directed by Rob Cohen. Streaming on Prime Video
You Might Also Like: Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991) is a key Fast & Furious text, up to and including the moment in which Diesel and Walker dine inside the same Malibu seafood shack as Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze once did.
The summer-camp movie that made Bill Murray a star and offered director Ivan Reitman a fortune-paved path from Canada's tax-shelter era to Hollywood's gilded comedy age, Meatballs holds up well against anyone's adolescent memories. There is an undeniable sweetness to the very specific Ontario seasonal shtick – the film was shot at Camp White Pine near Haliburton – while Murray's deadpan charm works overtime. But what makes Meatballs the ideal summer movie is that its story and mood neatly follow the shape of the season itself, starting off nervy and awkward before falling into a lingering kind of warmth.
Directed by Ivan Reitman. Streaming on CTV.ca
You Might Also Like: David Wain's Wet Hot American Summer (2001), a spoof so bizarrely specific that it surpasses its original targets.
Reitman and Murray delivered another summer hit just five years after their first, albeit going bigger and bolder with what is essentially National Lampoon Presents The Exorcist. Today, the Ghostbusters Cinematic Universe (ugh) feels so cynically stretched out and overexploited that it is easy to forget how brazenly goofy and bizarre the original film was, complete with supernatural party animals (what is Slimer if not a spectral facsimile of John Belushi?) and scenes featuring ghost-on-man oral sex (Dan Aykroyd, you rascal). And all the whizz-bang weirdness is anchored by Murray's smirking performance, which might be the closest a human being has ever come to embodying the what-me-worry attitude of the best, responsibility-free summer day.
Directed by Ivan Reitman. Streaming on Crave
You Might Also Like: Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black (1997) enlivens the Ghostbusters formula by prioritizing style over substance.
The summer belongs to the bat. As the 1980s were climbing out of an era of high-concept, effects-heavy action-comedies, Tim Burton swooped in and delivered an unapologetically dark and oft-nightmarish comic-book adventure that marked the dawn of a new kind of blockbuster that we're still reckoning with decades later. And just when it seemed as if the Batmobile's wheel could not be reinvented, Christopher Nolan tailored the genre for a new fit, delivering what can only be described as the best feel-bad summer blockbuster ever made, complete with riffs on George W. Bush-era torture, illegal surveillance and chaos agents who live to die.
Directed by Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton. Batman is on-demand via Apple TV; The Dark Knight streams on Crave
You Might Also Like: Iron Man (2008), which despite coming out the same summer as The Dark Knight – and going on to birth a franchise that has outlasted Nolan's Batman trilogy several times over – doesn't trigger the kind of 'you just had to be there' summer nostalgia as TDK.
Sweat, sex and the Catskills – what more could any horned-up teenager hope for? Almost four decades after Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey had the time of their lives, it is an open question as to how much Dirty Dancing reflected a particular kind of American summer, and how much American summer has since been recontextualized to match the aching feeling that several generations of young moviegoers felt when they first heard the words, 'Nobody puts Baby in the corner.'
Directed by Emile Ardolino. Streaming on Netflix
You Might Also Like: Roadhouse (1989), another dose of sultry Swayze.
Is there a line of dialogue more emblematic of the carpe-diem attitude of a summer day than, 'Where we're going, we don't need roads'? Granted, that quote only appears at the very end of Back to the Future, but everything that came before that moment was simply director Robert Zemeckis paving the way for a giant anything-goes overdose of plutonium-powered supernostalgia. The director's perfect formula – one part Michael J. Fox subverting his Family Ties neocon, one part wild and age-less Christopher Lloyd, and one part amorous odd couple Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover – was cultural catnip for every age of the Reagan era. And the film's spine-tingling powers, from Alan Silvestri's epic score to that magnificent ending, could convince even the greatest skeptic that America didn't need to be great (again) to be transformative.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Streaming on Prime Video
You Might Also Like: Although it's not out yet (and likely won't be released in the summer), Matt Johnson's time-travel buddy comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025) is the Canadian love letter to BTTF that you never knew you needed.
Every generation gets the summer superhero they deserve, and in the heat of 2002 – just after the existential wounds of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had begun to heal, but before there were so many Avengers around to trauma-bond that it became hard to keep track – Sam Raimi delivered the ultimate American saviour. Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker represented the good intentions that were buried, or perhaps repressed, inside all of us. And when Raimi's VFX team figured out how to develop and then wrangle just the right method to bring the web-slinger to glorious skyscraper-surfing life, modern Hollywood (and pop culture) would emerge forever changed. Great power, but greater responsibility.
Directed by Sam Raimi. Streaming on Crave
You Might Also Like: Joss Whedon's The Avengers (2012) picked up Raimi's formula and ran with it (some might say straight into the ground).
Today, when the T-800 has been mangled beyond recognition by a series of wobbly sequels, it is easy to forget just how deep an impact James Cameron's first supersized sequel left when it decimated multiplexes. Arnold Schwarzenegger – whose motorcycle-riding beast has been ripped off/homaged several times over, including in last month's latest Marvel go-round, Thunderbolts* – has simply never been better. And the entire thing radiates the kind of only-in-summer heat (up to and including Linda Hamilton's nuclear nightmare) that keeps it scorching in the back of every summer-movie junkie's memory.
Directed by James Cameron. Streaming on Netflix
You Might Also Like: The politics of True Lies (1994), Cameron's next summer-season Schwarzenegger slaughter-fest, have aged poorly. But the intimidatingly muscular action sequences still rule.
From hereon in, the summer belongs to Steven Spielberg. While it's tempting to place the director's swashbuckling ode to the serialized adventures of Allan Quatermain and Buck Rogers at the very top of this list, Raiders of the Lost Ark is such an untouchable masterpiece that it pretty much transcends the 'summer movie' catalogue to become something greater and immortal (but not so immortal that it'll melt your face off, Ernst Toht style).
Directed by Steven Spielberg. On-demand via Apple TV
You Might Also Like: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) has its detractors, but the chemistry between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery still cracks like a whip.
PHHOOOOOOOOOOM. That's not a typo, nor the experience of watching me experience a stroke in real-time print media. Instead, it's the jet-screaming sound that Tom Cruise and his armada made in the summer of 2022, waking up the entire film industry after two years of pandemic-era slumber. Maverick is not only a rip-roaring, fantastically fun sequel, but the movie that reignited the summer season itself, just as it was set to ride into the danger zone, never to return.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Streaming on Crave
You Might Also Like: The summer wouldn't look anything like it does today without Tony Scott's original Top Gun (1986).
Supersizing his own Jaws formula while allowing Universal to launch an unprecedented marketing blitzkrieg – I can still taste the 'Dino-Sized' triple cheeseburger special at McDonald's, likely because I'm still technically digesting it – Spielberg slickly officiated the summer's marriage of movies and merch. That the terrifying, beautiful, dangerously clever end product perfectly encapsulated the filmmaker's favourite themes – the rickety bridge between childhood wonder and childhood trauma – was no accident, either. Hold on to your butts, indeed.
Directed by Steven Spielberg. Streaming on Netflix
You Might Also Like: Saving Private Ryan (1998) feels like Spielberg's attempt to repent for the summer-movie sins of his Jurassic era – an argument that the season could handle an event-sized film for which no one would dare seek a Happy Meal tie-in.
Summer loving at its toe-tapping, Rockwellian-era-mining finest, Randal Kleiser's adaptation of the Broadway musical still swings. Coming off Saturday Night Fever (not to mention a touring production of Grease), John Travolta was at the peak of his beefcake powers, while Olivia Newton-John cast a spell over roughly half the North American population. Made for an exceptionally reasonable US$6-million, Grease became the highest-grossing musical of all time. But it also became synonymous with the feeling of a summer day, drifting away. Tell me more, tell me more.
Directed by Randal Kleiser Streaming on Paramount+
You Might Also Like: Without Danny and Sandy, there'd be no Mamma Mia! (2008), even if Grease and ABBA creatively peaked at about the same.
When Star Wars (we're going to ignore the retroactive addition of 'Episode IV') made its debut on Memorial Day weekend in 1977, no one could have possibly guessed that a B-movie starring a handful of up-and-comers and a clearly slumming Alec Guinness was about to dictate the course of popular culture for the next half-century. In terms of our very concepts of entertainment, nostalgia and 'brand awareness,' there is before Star Wars, and after. Today, it's pointless to debate whether American pop culture has become more aligned with the Empire or the Rebel Alliance because of what George Lucas wrought. It's all Star Wars, almost all the time. We've let the Wookiee win.
Directed by George Lucas. Streaming on Disney+
You Might Also Like: Lucas's American Graffiti (1973) is certainly more summer-themed, taking place on the last day of vacation in 1962, but it also has more in common with Star Wars than it lets on: the world-building, the hero's journey and of course, the preview of Harrison Ford's all-powerful charisma.
You could easily substitute Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind here, given that it predated E.T. by five summers and established so many facets of the director's extraterrestrial existentialism. But E.T. has the summer-movie edge in the way Spielberg crystallizes in amber (Jurassic Park-style, you might say) a particular kind of mythologized suburban season – a school-free stretch of wild bike rides, fast friendships forged in fire and the pleasures of exercising an instinctive defiance in authority. This is as much a movie about the cold vastness of the galaxy as it is about the warm comforts of the American cul-de-sac.
Directed by Steven Spielberg. Streaming on Prime Video
You Might Also Like: Three decades later, Spielberg flipped his reverence for extraterrestrials by painting them as magnificently cruel monsters in War of the Worlds (2005). Nobody wanted to phone these fellas' homes.
If you grew up between the start of the 1980s and the close of the 1990s, there's a good chance that, for a brief time in your youth, Rob Reiner's Stand By Me felt like the greatest movie ever made. Adapting one of Stephen King's non-nightmare stories – an oddity at the time that required several layers of explanations and excuses – Reiner compressed several generations' worth of coming-of-age nostalgia into one perfectly concentrated dose of end-of-summer, friends-forever adventure. That star River Phoenix died several years later at the tender age of 23 only crystallizes Reiner's film as an elegy to the power and pains of growing up.
Directed by Rob Reiner. Streaming on Netflix, Hollywood Suite
You Might Also Like: The Sandlot (1993) feels like the obvious inheritor to Reiner's coming-of-age throne, but Moonrise Kingdom (2012) shares more of the spirit, even when filtered through Wes Anderson's deadpan rigour.
If the first Die Hard is now indeed a Christmas movie, then the third chapter in the book of John McClane is a certified summer-movie classic: gritty and sweaty, panicked and preposterous, and always – always – hot as hell. From the opening bars of the Lovin' Spoonful's Summer in the City to the introduction of a particularly rough-and-tumble McClane (all boozy perspiration and pit stains, fresh from 'smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo,' as he tells his one-time Pulp Fiction co-star Samuel L. Jackson), Die Hard with a Vengeance is a blast of fresh air that no amount of humidity could dampen. Once Jeremy Irons joins the fun, director John McTiernan's return to the franchise that he started transforms into a wildly entertaining playground of violence. Welcome back to the party, pal.
Directed by John McTiernan. Streaming on Disney+
You Might Also Like: Jan de Bont's Speed (1994) is a different kind of ticking-bomb cop thriller, using the summer sizzle of L.A. instead of NYC to underline its boiling-point tension. But Keanu Reeves, much as we love John Wick around these parts, is no Willis-in-his-prime.
Rosie Perez dancing to Public Enemy. Danny Aiello sliding open the rusty iron gate of Sal's Pizzeria. Samuel L. Jackson waking up the entirety of Brooklyn. And Bill Nunn's Radio Raheem pumping up the volume. This is the long summer day that changed Spike Lee's life, but also the lives of so many moviegoers – pushing American cinema toward something blazing and fierce, dangerous and real. Do the Right Thing is brash, world-altering filmmaking that demands to be revisited every single year, preferably on the very hottest day of the year.
Directed by Spike Lee. On-demand via Apple TV
You Might Also Like: Lee's Summer of Sam (1999) carries that same boiling-point Big Apple tension, though laced with such a combustible energy that the whole thing threatens to short-circuit every five minutes.
'Welcome to Earth!' Will Smith says after landing an introductory punch to his outer-space enemy. The message: Don't ever think about blowing up our national monuments again – that's strictly Hollywood's job, dang it! By the time that Roland Emmerich destroyed the White House (a feat the director would attempt again almost two decades later with White House Down), along with most of Manhattan, it was clear that Independence Day was taking the disaster-movie playbook of the 1970s and scaling it up to summer-spectacle territory par excellence. From Bill Pullman's fiery July 4 speech that would make anyone cross the Delaware to the now deeply ironic finale in which Randy Quaid – who today spends much of his time seemingly on the run from the feds – saves America the Beautiful by essentially flying up an alien spacecraft's butt, Emmerich's massively entertaining disaster porn compresses 200-plus years of USA! USA! USA! mythology into one giant declaration of blockbuster independence.
Directed by Roland Emmerich. Streaming on Disney+
You Might Also Like: Smith had plenty of other years sitting atop the summer throne, but the crown never felt as earned as it did in Michael Bay's Bad Boys II (2003), which imagined summer in Miami as the eighth layer of Hell.
Who knows how many audiences never went in the water again after watching Spielberg's killer-shark thriller, but they sure as hell came back to the theatre, sometimes vomiting on the way. ('That's when I knew we had a hit,' the director would later recall after watching an attendee at a Dallas preview lose his lunch.) The first movie to be widely advertised on TV (35-plus spots a night) and the first to be widely released (465 theatres in one weekend, whereas the typical spread was just a handful), Jaws not only terrified and enthralled a generation but defined summer at the movies. Peter Benchley's novel opened with four simple words that not only heralded the violent spectacle to come, but the dawn of a new era of moviegoing: 'And so it began.'
Directed by Steven Spielberg. Streaming on Prime Video
You Might Also Like: On one hand, Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) also changed the course of summer movies, proving that different catalogues of intellectual property could somehow be combined into one zany masterpiece. But the film also feels like a blissful one-off, too: Despite decades of trying, no one has figured out how to crack a once-inevitable sequel. Th-th-that's all, folks!