Worst Movie Summer Ever: An Investigation

“Worst”
Ok, this is the big one, so let’s put to one side, as we so often do for the sake of discourse, the fact that “best” and “worst” are such subjective concepts that no one who regularly deploys them can think about them too literally for fear of slipping into a massive relativism-related depression. When we lightly dub 2016 the worst, we can be talking about any number of things, some more quantifiable than others. So let’s start with the easy stuff. Has summer 2016 been financially the worst in terms of straightforward box office receipts to date?

Box Office
Despite a number of high-profile disappointments, the answer is actually no, not really. Bearing in mind we’ve still a few weeks of new releases to go (come on, “Mechanic: Resurrection,” 2016 needs a new pair of shoes), and that a bunch of big films are still on wide release, it looks like summer 2016 is shaping up to be a solid, not stellar, box office season. The current figure for the 41 wide-release summer films so far is $3.4bn with an $83m average per title, which is some way off 2015’s total of $4.34bn with an average of $89m over 49 titles, but on track to rival or surpass 2014’s tally, in which a crowded slate of 53 titles yielded only $3.98bn for a $75m average. Remember, in addition to the Jason Statham vehicle glibly referenced above, we still have “Pete’s Dragon,” “Sausage Party” (which is tracking strongly), “Kubo and the Two Strings,” “Ben-Hur,” “War Dogs,” “Hands of Stone,” horror “Don’t Breathe,” “The Light Between Oceans” and “Morgan” to come. Some of these will be pants, but even if they average a little less than the summer movies so far this year, 2016 will likely sail past 2014’s total summer box office tally.

How profitable a summer it will be is of course a different question, and a largely unanswerable one until all the major studios open their books to us which they won’t do, likely because they’re “being audited.” But the general perception that 2016 contained more blockbusters that have flopped in the more meaningful sense — as in, underperformed against their production and marketing budgets — does seem to hold true. From “Star Trek Beyond” to “Ghostbusters” (which is currently reported to be looking at a $70m write-down) the inflated budgets of the summer’s biggest hopes means profitability seems a long way off for many, if not most. All of which contributes to a sense of a cash-strapped movie industry, even though in general audiences have been doing their bit and shelling out for tickets in roughly equivalent numbers to any other year.

Quality
Of course “worst” isn’t only, or even primarily, about money. It’s about the quality of the films. And this is where 2016 really seems to start to bite, hard. (I’m going to have to use the Rotten Tomatoes scores here because while it’s an immensely flawed system it’s the best consensus indicator we’ve got, whatever the “Suicide Squad” defenders may think). Even if we exclude the “rotten” likes of “Batman v Superman” (27%) and “Huntsman: Winter’s War” (17%) as being outside the timeframe, there have been a cavalcade of wide summer releases that have received negative scores, and have made it feel like week in, week out, Hollywood has been serving up extravagantly bloated yet subpar blockbusters — here’s that earlier list with their Rotten Tomatoes ratings: “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” (30%), “The Angry Birds Movie” (38%), X-Men: Apocalypse (48%), “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” (38%), “Warcraft,”(28%) “Independence Day: Resurgence” (32%), “Now You See Me 2” (34%), “Legend of Tarzan” (35%), “Suicide Squad” (26%).

These numbers become massively unwieldy (and frankly massively boring) to calculate in combination, but thankfully Matt Singer at Screencrush did it already — his stats are at the link, and date back to July 1st, but already then the upshot was twofold. Somewhat surprisingly he concludes that 2016’s summer wide releases up to that point averaged out at roughly the same level of critical acclaim as the previous few years. But when he factored in only those films with budgets of $100m or more the result was dramatic: 2016 at that point was the worst-reviewed year for big-budget blockbusters since 2009 (“X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” “Angels & Demons,” “Terminator Salvation,” “Land of the Lost,” “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” “G-Force,” and “G.I. Joe.”), and that’s before the likes of ‘Tarzan,’ “Jason Bourne” and “Suicide Squad” opened and registered their splats. A series of very unlikely occurrences would have to ensue (“Ben-Hur” gets an unprecedented 110% Fresh RT score!) in order for 2016 not to equal, or probably surpass 2009’s ignominious record as the worst-reviewed blockbuster summer for at least the past decade.

Perception
So the facts and figures look to be bolstering the case for 2016 claiming the “Worst Ever” sash, however marginally. But facts are one thing, perception is another. And when it comes to the echo chamber of modern film culture, as the old adage goes, perception is reality. And our perception of summer 2016 at the movies seems dramatically poorer than even those depressing stats fully convey: sadly, there is no Rotten Tomatoes for the human heart.

Instead, there are a few more nebulous factors to consider here, none particularly uplifting. 2016 at the movies didn’t drop on us out of the blue: many of the elements contributing to our current sorry state are merely the latest iterations of long-gestating downward trends. The homogenization of blockbuster “product” started probably all the way back in 1978 when “Jaws 2,” the first blockbuster sequel came out, but it’s a process that has completely overtaken our summers. And now, nearly 40 years later, the top 10 movies of summer 2016 contain precisely 2 titles that are not sequels, remakes, reboots or installments in a wider “Cinematic Universe” project (“Central Intelligence” and “The Secret Life of Pets“). And that doesn’t have to mean the films are bad, but it does mean that when they are, as have a lot of them been this year, the taint is not contained to just one movie — it leaks out into the franchises, brands and IPs they represent. It leaches out into the world.

We also have more channels than ever these days to amplify the signal, which is mostly a good thing, we hope (as we’re a part of that process), but does also mean when the signal is bad, or negative, that gets louder too. And that the importance of certain outlets, scores or otherwise gets completely distorted: witness the death threats against the critic who is the first to “ruin” a film’s 100% RT score, or the bizarre and sadly unfounded accusations that Marvel is bribing every critic in sight. 2016 has seen some of the most bitter and pointless debates spring up around big-ticket films that we have ever encountered — trolls gonna troll, but the critic vs fan schism has become ever more intractable during a summer bookended (for all intents and purposes) by two extraordinarily expensive and hotly anticipated DC films that should have been can’t-miss, but proved extremely unpopular with critics. That toxic discourse and the disproportionate signal-to-noise ratio it generates of course infects our impressions of what a blockbuster year is like.

Not only that, but the wealth of options available to us at the moment, what with Netflix and our era of Peak TV, means that we expect more from the movies than we did a couple of decades ago. With TV having caught up to and arguably surpassed cinema in the very kind of populist, escapist, yet expensive storytelling that used to be mainstream cinema’s domain, we’re holding our popcorn movies to a higher standard at exactly the time when studios are more risk averse than ever. This translates to them putting more money into empty spectacle based on pre-existing IP, while viewers, enjoying an unprecedented era of rich storytelling on their small screens, are rightly disgruntled when they leave the comfort of their sofa, shell out their hard-earned and get something as thinly formulaic as “X-Men: Apocalypse” or “Independence Day: Resurgence”. In addition to the simple convenience and relative cost-effectiveness that on-demand entertainment outlets offer, this is the more insidious way in which, as Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos put it, Peak TV has come at the expense of movie culture.

All these factors outside the quality of the films themselves, and even outside the box office, conspire to color our experience of film culture beyond what is easily measurable. But the final way that 2016’s summer at the movies seems more than usually atrocious is even more diffuse and unquantifiable: summer 2016 has happened during goddamn 2016. From Trump to Brexit to an unprecedented number of high-profile celebrity deaths, this year has been bad however you cut it, and film culture, being part of wider culture, can’t help but be battered by those same prevailing winds. So as I said up top, normally if we heard someone bandying around the “worst summer ever” statement, we’d be the exact people to push our spectacles up our noses, clear our throats and preach forbearance. But when it comes to summer 2016? Eh, knock yourselves out.