If we had a MULTIVERSE wormhole to travel back to in the summer of 2019, we’d find a world with no idea of its tragic future.
At the multiplexes, we’d see a sky’s-the-limit boxoffice where records were best written with pencils. Figuring out the summer’s top-grossing film would be complicated because that summer didn’t begin with the first weekend in May. That’s because Disney/Marvel opened AVENGERS: ENDGAME on 4/26/19 (pictured), echoing its 4/27/18 opening of AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.
ENDGAME’s first weekend generated a staggering $357.1M vs. INFINITY’s $257.7M. The problem was that, according to Hollywood’s records keepers, summer ran from 5/3 – 8/31, which put ENDGAME in the spring (3/1 – 5/2).
So ENDGAME wound up as spring 2019’s top title with $858.4M domestic, most of which was earned during the summer. The summer of 2019’s official Top Five (+ domestic cumes) were: Disney’s THE LION KING ($543.6M); Disney/Pixar’s TOY STORY 4 ($434M); Sony/Marvel’s SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME ($390.5M); Disney’s ALADDIN ($355.6M); and Universal’s FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS HOBBS & SHAW ($174M).
Those numbers were mostly to dream about in the pandemic multiverse we’ve been trapped in these past two years, but this summer should be a different story with tentpoles like TOP GUN: MAVERICK (5/27), JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION (6/10), LIGHTYEAR (6/17), MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU (7/1); and THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER (7/8).