The best and worst summers at the movies

It’s not typically lionized as one of the great movie summers, but 1979—which capped arguably the best decade ever for movies—included two all-timers: Apocalypse Now and Alien. Francis Ford Coppola made his masterpiece, and Ridley Scott made his name, in movies inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart Of Darkness. In both, a doomed crew heads out beyond civilization on a dangerous mission to make things more convenient for the powers-that-be; Coppola lays his madness at the feet of the military, while Scott blames a faceless corporation. In the end, one protagonist survives, but with no sense they’ve made the larger world any better for their efforts. Subsequent summers wouldn’t hear of such bummers, but in the aftermath of Vietnam, our biggest entertainments were still coming to terms with the war.

Also released in the summer of 1979: The Amityville Horror, Moonraker, Meatballs, Dracula, and Rocky II.

1982 gets all the glory, but its preceding year was no slouch. Superman II in its day was as anticipated a sequel as The Empire Strikes Back, and though the years since have revealed how compromised Richard Donner’s intentions were, Christopher Reeve’s second turn in the cape would often be held up as a shining example of doing it right ... at least until Spider-Man 2 perfected the template decades later. Indiana Jones made his debut in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Disney went pretty dark with Dragonslayer, the Muppets made their best movie with The Great Muppet Caper, and John Landis delivered the horror-comedy masterpiece An American Werewolf In London, which would inspire Michael Jackson to make a certain lycanthrope-themed music video.

Also released in the summer of 1981: History Of The World:Part I, The Cannonball Run, Stripes, Arthur, For Your Eyes Only, and Outland.

It’s frequently called the “greatest geek year ever,” most recently by a TV miniseries of that name. And its major summer releases certainly make a strong case: Conan The Barbarian, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, Poltergeist, Rocky III, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial were among the big hits. Meanwhile, The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max II) and Blade Runner created new sci-fi aesthetics that would define their respective subgenres of post-apocalypse action and dystopian megalopolis. Even movies that weren’t hits at the time have lived on and spawned imitators, from John Carpenter’s eldritch horrors in The Thing to the nascent CGI of Tron.

Also released in the summer of 1982: Night Shift, An Officer And A Gentleman, Pink Floyd: The Wall, and, proving no summer is perfect, we also got Megaforce.

You can thank 1984 for the PG-13 rating that nearly every respectable blockbuster has nowadays. Though the first movie to be released officially certified with it was Red Dawn, it was Steven Spielberg, as director of Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom, and producer of Gremlins, who horrified parents with microwaved monsters and a heart-ripping sacrifice in big-budget fantasy films ostensibly for kids. Thus was born the need for a rating between PG and R; the subsequent perception of the director as a softie and sentimentalist had yet to take.

Also released in the summer of 1984: Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, The Last Starfighter, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Purple Rain, Dreamscape, The NeverEnding Story, Streets Of Fire, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, and Top Secret!

A year before Batman would burst onto screens, Hollywood still made original blockbusters, with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (based on a book but VERY loosely), Coming To America, and Midnight Run among the season’s biggest hits. Willow, George Lucas’ attempt to do for fantasy what Star Wars had done for sci-fi, didn’t fare as well with Ron Howard at the helm, but it has only grown in esteem ever since.

Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ brought some viewers out to theaters to picket its alleged blasphemy, while TV comedy star Bruce Willis blew away expectations in the template-setting action epic Die Hard, and Young Guns made the Western cool among teens again. Ironically, the much-hyped Memorial Day movie showdown between Rambo III and Crocodile Dundee 2 has mostly been forgotten.

Also released in the summer of 1988: Poltergeist III, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and Bull Durham.

In 2008, cinema still loved superheroes, but the “cinematic universe” concept hadn’t been developed for them yet. Hence we could get not just a great DC movie—maybe the greatest—in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, but also a good Marvel movie at long last with Iron Man, and a completely original superhero in Peter Berg’s Hancock. You could arguably throw in an animated one too, as Kung Fu Panda kicked off the most successful DreamWorks animated franchise since Shrek. Though it didn’t spawn sequels, Pixar’s WALL-E earned the company some of its best reviews ever, concealing an anti-consumerist eco-message behind a tear-jerking tale of two adorable robots in love.

Less noticed at the time was the first Star Wars feature film since the prequels, and the only one released by Warner Bros.—The Clone Wars. Mostly mocked when it came out, the film’s teenage girl protagonist would turn out to be a pretty big deal, even as her slangy catchphrases annoyed some of the fans. That character, Ahsoka Tano, is now beloved and has her very own live-action show. That summer, though, female audiences proved more into Mamma Mia and the Sex And The City movie. Male-skewing comedies scored big too, with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly playing Step Brothers, Seth Rogen getting high AF in Pineapple Express, and Adam Sandler going weirder than usual in You Don’t Mess With The Zohan.

Also released in the summer of 2008: Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor, and Journey To The Center Of The Earth 3D.

Any time anyone complains that today’s blockbusters are soulless, samey, hollow effects movies, force them to sit through the unholy trinity of Twister, Mission: Impossible, and Independence Day. They’ll be begging for Eternals or Black Widow long before Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt drive into the first storm. Remembered mainly for their respective trailer-friendly moments: a flying cow, Tom Cruise on wires, and the White House exploding—these three truly represent the mindless junk that existed before Kevin Feige started actually caring a bit about story. Insulting to one’s intelligence and with a tenuous grasp at best on science and technology, all three build up to admittedly impressive set pieces with really long stretches of dullness, and in the case of Mission: Impossible, a fandom-betraying plot twist the movie has to show twice to make sure you get it. With The Rock, later that same summer, Michael Bay showed them all how it’s done.

Elsewhere, Shaquille O’Neal starred as Kazaam, and the monumentally unfunny filmmaking duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer kicked off a decade-plus string of laugh-free parody movies with Spy Hard, directed by Friedberg’s dad.

Also released in the summer of 1996 were the semi-redemptive Trainspotting and Lone Star.

A summer of disaster movies in every sense of the word, this was the year we got dueling asteroid flicks, as Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact went up against Michael Bay’s Armageddon. One was a more sensitive, philosophical take that killed off its leads; the other was bombastic, ridiculous destruction that also featured Ben Affleck attempting to wax lyrical about Animal Crackers while an awful Aerosmith song played. When either movie gets mentioned today, it’s usually ironic, or as a celebration of Affleck’s DVD commentary mocking his own work. Then came Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla, a movie in which a creature that neither looked nor acted much like Godzilla encountered Matthew Broderick and then disappeared for an hour before meeting a King Kong-like fate, shot by airplanes on the Brooklyn Bridge. Toho, the studio that released the original Godzilla in 1954, hated it so much they had the real Godzilla take out the impostor in record time in a subsequent film. Elsewhere, Warren Beatty returned to the director’s chair for the first time since Dick Tracy with Bulworth, a misguided attempt to mock political correctness—or wokeness, in today’s parlance—that’s best left forgotten.

Also released in the summer of 1998 that proved beach season wasn’t a total write-off: Out Of Sight and Saving Private Ryan.

Anyone remember that time they cast Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince Of Persia? No, really, that was 2010's big Memorial Day movie, and one of the few that summer that wasn’t a sequel or remake, though it was a video-game movie, with all that implies. The rest of the season was filled with the likes of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, Iron Man 2, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Shrek Forever After, The Karate Kid remake, Grown Ups, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, The Other Guys, Salt, The Expendables, The A-Team, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

On the plus side, also released in the summer of 2010 were Toy Story 3, Despicable Me, and Inception.

One might think the first year of the COVID pandemic would have been the worst, but among the tiny handful of releases, the ratio of quality entries was strong in 2020, with the likes of Bill And Ted Face the Music, Tenet, Palm Springs, The Painted Bird, and The Trip To Greece.

2021, on the other hand, was a year of secondary sequels and reboots: Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Peter Rabbit 2, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, Cruella, Spiral: From The Book Of Saw, Candyman, Paw Patrol, Don’t Breathe 2, The Suicide Squad, Jungle Cruise, Black Widow, F9: The Fast Saga, A Quiet Place Part II, and The Forever Purge offered familiar leftovers which didn’t exactly cry out to be seen on the big screen at the risk of one’s health.

Also released in the summer of 2021: David Lowery’s The Green Knight and M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, which both stood out as directorial visions really trying to shake things up.

No article on movie summers is complete without mentioning 1975, since it started the whole seasonal shebang with Jaws. (Although 1973's The Exorcist also helped lay the pipe for the beach season blockbuster).

Otherwise, the summer was a mixed bag that—on the plus side—gave us Robert Altman’s Nashville, Woody Allen’s Love And Death, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But it also had many tedious sequels, including Return Of The Pink Panther, The French Connection II, and Walking Tall Part II. Meanwhile, Disney, years before becoming a dependable seasonal powerhouse, offered up The Apple Dumpling Gang and the somewhat racist One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing. (Although that missing dinosaur did end up in Star Wars as the Krayt dragon skeleton on Tatooine, so it wasn’t a loss for everyone.)

A true mixed bag of a summer, but, as Humphrey Bogart didn’t quite tell Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, “we’ll always have Jaws.”

If Jaws lit the fuse for the summer blockbuster, Star Wars sent it into the stratosphere. Had nothing else been released that summer, the beach season of 1977 would have at least been awarded Honorable Mention. Before Star Wars became Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, it kicked off a six-movie trend of owning Memorial Day; one that continued until Disney bought Lucasfilm and decided December worked better. Star Wars crowded out William Friedkin’s Sorcerer at the time, though that has since been re-appraised, and paid tribute to in an episode of The Mandalorian. The Spy Who Loved Me, also that summer, remains arguably the definitive Roger Moore James Bond film.

Also released in the summer of 1977, the Jaws rip-offs The Deep and Orca, plus a trifecta of bad sequels, Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Bad News Bears In Breaking Training, and Walking Tall: Final Chapter.

The first year of the Reagan decade gave us two pretty undisputed masterpieces, unless you’re named Stephen King: The Empire Strikes Back and The Shining.

On the one hand, those two movies are so great they should almost give the rest of the summer automatic immunity. The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, and Airplane! bolster that case. On the other: Xanadu, Smokey And The Bandit II, Oh Heavenly Dog, The Gong Show Movie, Up the Academy, and The Fiendish Plot Of Dr. Fu Manchu. This was one of those years where time definitely told the tale, and separated the good from the ... less so.