The Summer Movie Season of 2023: Predictions

Last summer, during which it seemed fairly clear that the American and global box office were both recovering, the take still fell short of what the industry hoped for--in large part, in my view, because there were fewer than the usual number of big "tentpole" releases. (There were just Dr. Strange 2, Jurassic Park 3/6, Top Gun 2 and Thor 4, with the quiver empty after early July--four releases stretched thin over the first two months or so instead of a more evenly spread out eight over the four month period.)

By contrast the summer of 2023 looks to be on par with pre-pandemic summers in this respect, with Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast and Furious 10, Mission: Impossible 7, Transformers 6, The Flash and even Indiana Jones 5 coming our way in May-July, with Meg 2 and Blue Beetle coming in August.

Will these do the trick?

The Guardian series is relatively well-received ("worst" Chris and all), but box office-wise more Thor than Avengers--while Marvel's brand has not been looking its best lately. The Transformers franchise is even more clearly "not what it used to be." Blue Beetle is an "upgrade" of a formerly straight-to-streaming release about another second-stringer (as an alternative to the cancellation seen with Batgirl), and seems a particular long shot for a first-rank hit. And as I have said earlier, I am not very optimistic about Indiana Jones 5, which I think may fall into that ever-larger territory of "huge gross by any sane standard, but arguable flop given what it cost to make, what it netted at the end, and the expectations people must have had for it" (the way that, for example, Ant-Man 3 or Black Panther 2 have done, and maybe not even with more cash in the till).

That leaves the other three. If MI7 may do as well as its predecessors I do not expect to see it better those movies, which do well enough by spy-fi standards but fall short of the absolute top (though a billion dollar take does not seem wholly out of the question, if mainly as a function of rising ticket prices, although I can also picture it getting a bump from good will from the press and from fans of Top Gun 2 toward Tom Cruise). And Fast and Furious 10 will probably do better--though not necessarily beat its predecessors (impressive as their earnings have been).

That leaves The Flash. Apparently the feature film about the character has really, really great buzz--the buzz actually holding it to be better than any DC Universe film seen in a long time, maybe the best of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) lot, maybe better than anything since Christopher Nolan's Batman films (the assumption, of course, being that these were superlative, an opinion I share less and less ). Still, the Flash is no Batman or Wonder Woman, I suspect no character is completely immune to superhero fatigue and DC Universe fatigue, and the DC Extended Universe as we know it is known to be on its way out, while I suspect the earlier, absolutely terrible, publicity attaching to the person in question(which less than a year ago had people talking of "cancellation" of the film and its star) will not be conveniently and completely forgotten eleven weeks from now. A wildly successful Flash movie is therefore no sure thing, no matter how good it supposedly is--but it may have more potential to surprise observers than anything else.

All the same, even with The Flash proving a hit--even its proving the biggest hit in DCEU history--I expect that all this will add up to a summer that, while clearly better than any of the last three years, looks more like a mediocre pre-pandemic summer than a sensational one.