|
|
Get Four
|  | MAY 22, 2006
The Biggest Summer BlockbustersSummer is Hollywood's biggest season. Find out which films have been the top grossersThe opening-weekend success of Sony Pictures' (SNE ) The Da Vinci Code proved that watching a summer blockbuster means more than just getting the chance to cool off in an air-conditioned theater. For Hollywood, the summer season means earning big bucks by releasing huge, crowd-pleasing pictures. The Da Vinci Code is a prime example of such a film -- not only was it the No. 1 film this weekend, earning $77 million in the U.S., but it is also, as of now, the largest weekend movie debut this year. The birth of what we know now as the summer blockbuster was in June, 1975, when Jaws was released. The thriller about a giant man-eating shark is not only credited as the first-ever summer blockbuster, it also set the tone for summer movies for years to come. The next big summer release was two years later: George Lucas' Star Wars became a cultural phenomenon and solidified the idea among Hollywood studios that the action/adventure/suspense genre worked for summer releases. As 2006's summer movie season begins, BusinessWeek Online is looking back at the highest-grossing summer movies of all time. Deciding whether a film qualifies as a bona fide summer movie is based on the film's release date, because as you may have noticed, the studios follow their own calendar. Even though it is considered a summer film, The Da Vinci Code's release date of May 19 hardly counts as summer. According to Brandon Gray, the president and publisher of online box-office reporting service Box Office Mojo, "for the past 10 years, summer-blockbuster wannabes have come out in the first weekend of May" through early August, with the films with the most box-office potential released earlier in the summer -- typically May or June. The top 10 grossing summer films of all time were all released in May or June, save for one -- 1994's Forrest Gump, which was released in early July. When compiling this list ticket-price inflation was considered. The box-office gross listed for every movie is adjusted for inflation based on 2006's national ticket-price average, which is then multiplied by the estimated number of admissions. According to Box Office Mojo, the average movie-ticket price in 2006 was $6.04, vs. $2.23 in 1977 when the original Star Wars was released. It was a paltry $2.05 when the oldest film on the list, Jaws, was released. So will any of this year's summer movies get a chance to top the ones on our list? Among the likely contenders for blockbuster status this summer are 20th Century Fox's (NWS ) X-Men: The Last Stand, Disney (DIS ) and Pixar's Cars, and Superman Returns from Warner Bros. (TWX ). Gray says that the movie to watch out for this year is Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, scheduled for release on July 7. The sequel, Gray says, has all the right elements -- action and adventure, and the surprising success of the original -- to become this year's biggest summer movie. Click here for the slide show on the top-grossing summer films of all time.  Pisani is a writer for BusinessWeek Online in New York
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.
Buy a link now! Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
 Copyright 2006, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Notice |
Printer-Friendly Version
