The summer movie season is the most anticipated movie season of the entire year. It is more anticipated than the fall/winter movie season (better known as the Oscar movie season) and the January/February movie season, which is known for a lot of terrible movies to come out during that time, according to most movie critics. This summer contains a wide range of different movies that span from Furious 7 in April to Straight Outta Compton (a highly anticipated NWA biopic) in August. The list of summer movies this year contains several sequels, spin-offs and continuations of existing franchises, and a few of original ideas for the big blockbusters this year.
Movie sequels have usually been associated with film studios just trying to squeeze extra money out of franchises, regardless of how the quality of the movie is. This year’s amount of sequels might be because of movie studios squeezing money from those franchises, to capitalize on making these franchise’s popularity or to continue the existing stories of the movies. This year’s official start to the summer movie season started with Furious 7 (which is the seventh installment in the franchise). Now some movies that will come out throughout the summer, that are sequels, are Avengers: Age of Ultron on May 1st, Pitch Perfect 2 on May 15th, Insidious: Chapter 3 on June 5th, Ted 2 on June 26nd, Minions (a spin-off of the Despicable Me franchise) on July 10th and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation on July 31st. The quality of the movies have yet to be determined, but we will see at the end of the summer where they will rank among the best of the summer.
There has been a trend in the past few years that involves continuations of old, and thought to be already concluded, franchises. The past couple years in film have seen examples of reviving old franchises and spawning sequels. For example, in December of 2013, Anchorman: The Legend Continues was released a whole nine years after the original Anchorman and last November, the movie Dumb and Dumber To was released and came out a little over 20 years after the release of the first movie. Some franchises have taken a long time to get another sequel off the ground and now some of them will be released this summer. Some franchise continuations include Mad Max: Fury Road on May 15th (30 years after previous movie), Jurassic World on June 12th (14 years after previous movie), Terminator: Genisys on July 1st (6 years after previous movie and 12 after the last Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Vacation on July 29th (18 years after the last Vacation movie).
Hopefully these revivals of franchises can live on to start new trilogies, because if not, we will wait another 15 years for a sequel to these movies.
Hollywood has lacked in the department of original ideas as summer blockbuster movies. Most original ideas today are made as low-budget indie movies that usually do not get the nation-wide release, so many people do not have the opportunity to see these movies. Fortunately, some of these original ideas are coming out this summer . They are movies like Tomorrowland on May 22nd (movie based off Disneyland ride starring George Clooney), San Andreas on May 29th (disaster movie starring Dwayne Johnson), Spy on June 5th (action comedy starring Melissa McCarthy and Jason Statham), Inside Out on June 16th (Pixar animated movie starring Amy Poehler) and Ant-Man coming out on July 17th (based off the Marvel comic book starring Paul Rudd). Hollywood is slowly becoming a world where there aren’t many original ideas, maybe these few movies can change that point of view on original concepts.
The 2015 summer movie season has already started and there is a lot to check out this summer! Every summer, there is always that movie or movies to look for. There is a little bit for everyone from Minions to Insidious: Chapter 3 to Ant-Man. This is easily one of the most anticipated summer movie seasons of the past decade and with the variety of movies coming out, there will be many people attracted to the theater. These movies will have a lot of people filling the seats, question is: will you be one of those people?