CinemaNerdz

Summer Movie Recap (2017 Edition)

Scott Davis
Michael Rooker in Guardians of the Galaxy

It’s hard to believe, but the 2017 summer movie season is already over. It seems just like yesterday we were anxiously awaiting the releases of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Wonder Woman, Dunkirk, War for the Planet of the Apes, and for a small few, possibly even Transformers: The Last Knight. All of those, and so many more, have been released and analyzed, while some have even made their way to home release already.

With Labor Day fast approaching, we thought it would be the perfect time to recap everything that happened this summer. From what movies lived up to the hype, to which ones didn’t, to even the box-office winners and losers, we’ve got you covered. So, without further ado, here is our Summer Movie Recap (2017 Edition).

 

The Best Movies

Despite what some might say or write, there were a lot of good movies this summer. Movies like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Alien: Covenant, and even, some may say, Annabelle: Creation were all solid entries in their perspective franchises.

I want to bring up one stretch of the summer that especially impressed, however. From late-June through mid-July, audiences were treated to some great movies. Baby Driver came out on June 30 and finally delivered Edgar Wright a mainstream hit. Spider-Man: Homecoming came out on July 7 and featured not only the best Spider-Man performance to date, but possibly the best villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet. War for the Planet of the Apes came out on July 14 and closed this Apes trilogy on an incredible high note.

Finally, Christopher Nolan gave us one of his most impressive works and arguably the best movie of the year in Dunkirk. Oh, and the year’s best comedy, The Big Sick, was slowly expanding in theaters too. That was an amazing four-week stretch for movie fans and is most likely not to be repeated at any point through the rest of the year.

 

The Disappointing Movies

While not every one of the movies listed here might not be “bad” per se, these are the movies that severely disappointed us. Whether we had our high hopes crushed by what was delivered, or we could see the train wreck coming from miles away, this summer did have some pretty terrible movies.

As pointed out in my review, Transformers: The Last Knight is not only the worst movie of the year, but it’s also the worst movie of the last couple of years. This is something we all expected, but many were thinking that this could not be worse than Transformers: Age of Extinction. We were wrong, so very wrong.

Other summer movie duds include King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword, Snatched, Baywatch, All Eyez on Me, The Dark Tower, The Mummy, The Emoji Movie, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. These films not only disappointed audiences in terms of entertainment value, but they also failed at the box office. A movie that was mildly successful at the box office (especially overseas) but was incredibly disappointing was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. It appears that a case of “sequelitis” hit critics and audiences hard, and it looks like something we’ll have to deal with every summer for the foreseeable future.

 

The Box-Office Winners

Let’s get this out of the way first: this summer saw the least amount of movie tickets sold during the season in the last twenty-five years. Thanks to a couple of huge tent-pole films drastically underperforming (more on those later), this summer’s box office was not pretty. There were a couple of standouts that need to be mentioned.

The biggest winner of the season was no doubt Wonder Woman. Many were eager to see a female-led superhero flick be not only a box-office smash, but a critical success as well. Wonder Woman accomplished both. The film has racked up over $407 million, and another $400 million overseas, for a worldwide total of $806 million. With the film’s strong 92% on RottenTomatoes and great word of mouth, the film stayed in the Top 10 for almost three months and has become the third biggest Warner Bros. movie ever, just behind The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.

Wonder Woman is undeniably the box-office winner of the summer, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t other hits. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 dominated the beginning of summer and went on to gross $389.4 million ($862 million worldwide), and the other Marvel release, Spider-Man: Homecoming, faired decently with $318.9 million ($737.1 million worldwide). Other winners included Dunkirk with $172.5 million ($412.6 million worldwide), Baby Driver with $103.3 million ($194.2 million worldwide), and Annabelle: Creation $78.2 million ($216 million worldwide, as of this writing).

Those are all great box-office numbers given their respective budgets, but can you guess what movie made the most money worldwide this summer? Surprisingly not a superhero flick or a Disney movie, but Despicable Me 3 went on to gross a whopping $972.6 million worldwide, with $254.6 million coming from the United States. We’ll probably see similar numbers when Minions 2 comes out in summer 2020.

 

The Box-Office Losers

With this year being the worst box office in many years, you’d expect there to be a couple of big losers, and there certainly were. The biggest loser was either King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

The Guy Ritchie directed King Arthur flick cost Warner Bros. an estimated $175 million and only made $39.2 million stateside, with a disappointing worldwide total of $146.2 million. Valerian cost about as much, $177 million, and made about the same stateside, $39.7 million, with a worldwide total standing at $172.6 million. Both movies were expensive endeavors and ended up burning their respective studios badly.

Other box office losers included Transformers: The Last Knight with $130.2 million stateside, The Mummy with $80.1 million stateside, and Baywatch which made only $58.1 million stateside (but did end up making $177.4 million across the globe). Hopefully Fall releases like Thor: Ragnarok, Justice League, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi will help bring 2017 out of its box-office slump.

 

Final Thoughts

Overall, this summer had a lot of highs (Dunkirk) and a lot of lows (Transformers: The Last Knight), but it did seem like there was something for everyone. Even people who weren’t into the big summer blockbusters found movies to fit their tastes, i.e. Girls Trip. Incidentally, Dunkirk was my favorite movie of the summer and is a movie I think we will be talking about come Oscar season. I was also a big fan of Spider-Man: Homecoming, War for the Planet of the Apes, and The Big Sick.

Be sure to check out the weekly Preview Reel column on CinemaNerdz.com, where I break down each new release this fall, starting next week with the highly-anticipated horror film It.

Scott Davis

Scott Davis is a recent graduate of Oakland University where he earned a degree in journalism. He worked for the student newspaper on campus, The Oakland Post, where he became the paper's managing editor. He also earned a minor in Cinema Studies at OU. Scott enjoys all things film and TV related, especially the blockbuster kind. He might be the biggest Christopher Nolan fan you know.
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