LOS ANGELES - Optimus Prime and his fellow Autobots can turn from cars into heavily armed giant robots and save the day on-screen, but even they won’t be able to transform this summer’s lackluster box office.
Despite this past weekend’s $100-million opening for Michael Bay’s critically maligned “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” domestic grosses are running 13 percent behind last summer’s - and the road ahead doesn’t look any rosier.
Heading into summer, overall box office was actually up roughly 9 percent, compared with 2013. But since early May, the wind has gone out of Hollywood’s sails, and that healthy head start has been wiped away.
With the summer season typically making up as much as 40 percent of the studios’ overall annual revenue, the recent box office swoon has been worrying for the industry, though perhaps not panic-inducing.
“It’s not so bad - there is still a lot of money being generated,” says Greg Foster, chief executive of Imax Entertainment and senior executive vice president of the Imax Corp. “I learned a long time ago that when you start declaring trends on a three- or six-month period of time, you’re going to become a ping-pong ball.”
You can blame the distractions of the World Cup or the ever-proliferating alternatives on TV, but simply put, there just haven’t been enough big movies this summer - and the ones there have been just haven’t been big enough.
Whereas last summer, seven blockbusters crossed the $200-million mark, only three have reached that threshold so far this season: “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” “Maleficent” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” And there have been no monster-sized hits close to last year’s “Iron Man 3” ($409 million) and “Despicable Me 2” ($368 million) or 2012’s “The Avengers” ($623 million) and “The Dark Knight Rises” ($448 million).
Indeed, the two biggest smashes of the year so far, “Captain America: Winter Soldier” and “The Lego Movie,” both hit theaters before anyone started breaking out the suntan oil and beach chairs.
The rest of the summer doesn’t look that hot, either.
As for the domestic market, the rest of this summer’s slate looks unlikely to reverse the downward trend. Although the much-buzzed-about “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” should do well when it opens July 11, expectations are that this July won’t match last year’s revenue, while August’s most anticipated movies - including Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” and Paramount’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” reboot - are genuine wild cards.
Of course, hope springs eternal in Hollywood and memories are short, and it’s possible that in time, the recent box office doldrums may fade like the summer breeze.
“Chances are that when the next ‘Hunger Games’ movie comes out in November, all will be forgotten,” says Nash. “That will be the real test.”
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