The Summer 2018 Box Office: Solo and The Meg

I haven't done an overview of the summer box office in quite a while, in part because it has become so damned repetitive, in its commercial successes--and perhaps even more consistently, its artistic failures. Every year Hollywood laments its earnings, every year the more critical critics decry the shallowness and sameness and staleness of it all, every year we hear promises that Hollywood will change, and every year, it demonstrates that not only has it not done so, but that its lack of memory is utter and total, the promise unremembered.

So I'll restrict my comments on the whole tedious thing to the two films I felt I actually had somethijng to say about: Solo and Meg.

After over three months of release in which it has had long play in every major market (even Japan got it before the end of June), Solo remains short of the $400 million global mark, like I guessed it would be after what, only in the context of the money poured into it, was regarded as a dismal weekend. What it will mean for the franchise remains very much a matter of rumor and speculation. But the shock seems undeniable.

By contrast Meg proved that rarity, a movie that performs above expectations rather than below them, and that still greater rarity, the seemingly written-off dump month release that proves a blockbuster. (The predictions were $10-20 million in its opening weekend in North America, but it actually pulled in more than twice the high end of the range, $45 million.) A somewhat more modest production with much more modest expectations, The Meg has already outgrossed Solo globally (the China market has helped a lot), and if the figures discussed earlier are to be believed (a $400 million break-even point, due to the advantages it enjoys as a Chinese coproduction in that makret), already well into the black, and still raking it in (in its fourth weekend of U.S. release, still at #2).

A follow-up is not a sure thing (given the nine figure budgets and equally hefty promotional bills, the hefty competition and the terms of Meg's success as a bit of goofy fun, the margins are not exactly vast), but it still looks quite likely. We might even see other Steve Alten works finding their way to the big screen as a result, in what looks like at least partial redemption of the dashed hopes held for it all way back when we first heard of the hopes for the project.

From the standpoint of the business Meg's success falls far short of balancing out Solo's underperformance, and all it represents (the ultimate in the Hollywood franchise mentality, by way of the franchise that did more than any other to establish the blockbuster as we know it). Still, looking at the two trajectories together, I suppose there's a certain symmetry in them.