Studios have released a familiar assortment of action tales, family flicks and star driven comedies since the summer-blockbuster season began in early May.
However, while overall business has been solid, fans have been choosier than usual, spending a fortune on one superhero sensation, kicking in for a handful of midline hits and generally bypassing everything else.
Movies featuring box-office heavyweights Johnny Depp (Dark Shadows), Tom Cruise (Rock of Ages) and Adam Sandler (That's My Boy) fell flat, as did the action spectacle Battleship.
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones pulled in fair crowds for Men in Black 3, though the action comedy played to a smaller audience than its predecessors. The animated tales Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted and Brave joined the action adventures Snow White & the Huntsman and Prometheus as $100 million hits.
But a summer that looked like an easy record-breaker at the start really can be summed up in two words: The Avengers. With $600 million domestically, the Marvel Comics superhero mash-up accounts for a third of Hollywood's summer revenues, taking in more than the rest of the season's top-five movies combined.
The Avengers continues a trend in which a few big movies suck up a greater portion of moviegoers' money as studios focus on their so-called tent-pole releases, franchise films that cost a fortune to make but pay off like billion-dollar jackpots when they work.
But The Avengers has made this summer more lop-sided than ever, and with two more colossal superhero films coming in July - The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises - the season could end up with three towering tent-poles and a whole lot of tadpoles down below.
"I don't know that I've ever seen a summer so top-heavy," said Paul Dergarabedian, analyst for box-office tracker Hollywood.com. "I think we're going to have Avengers, Dark Knight and Spider-Man being the big, big movies of summer with a lot of other movies really bringing up the rear, like way behind.
"They can't all be home runs, but you need solid doubles and triples, and we haven't seen that many of those so far." Hollywood went on a box-office tear the first four months of this year, with revenues running as much as 20% ahead of 2011's on the strength of such pre-summer hits as The Hunger Games, Dr. Seuss' the Lorax, 21 Jump Street, Safe House and The Vow.
After The Avengers opened with a recordbreaking $207 million weekend domestically, the ensemble film featuring Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson kept on filling theatre seats while other big releases came and went with barely a ripple.
© Copyright (c) Postmedia News
