An Unusually Crowded Summer Box Office, in Charts

Hollywood’s summer season officially ended last weekend, and overall box-office revenues were up even after adjusting for inflation. Yet there were also a lot of high-profile flops and disappointments (“Lone Ranger,” “Turbo,” “R.I.P.D.,” “White House Down,” and so on). What gives?

Part of the problem was that the release schedule these last few months was so crowded, with lots and lots of would-be blockbusters opening almost simultaneously, as I write in an It’s the Economy column for The New York Times Magazine.

Summer usually brings a higher number of these big “tent pole” releases than other seasons. Which makes sense, given that Americans’ appetite for movie outings probably increases during the summer thanks to school breaks, vacations and heat waves. But this summer the release schedule was unusually congested, and moviegoing demand doesn’t increase quite enough during the dog days to absorb an unlimited number of big-budget films.

To give you a sense of scale: There were 31 films that each played on at least 3,000 screens nationwide this summer (a decent proxy for a film aiming for a very wide audience). That’s a new high. The average over the previous decade was 23.3 films, according to data from Box Office Mojo.

Source: Box Office Mojo. Season definitions: Winter is the first day after New Year’s week or weekend through th Thursday before the first Friday in March. Spring is the first Friday in March through the Thursday before the first Friday in May. Summer is the first Friday in May through Labor Day weekend. Fall is the day after Labor Day weekend through the Thursday before the first Friday in November. Holiday is the first Friday in November through New Year’s week or weekend.

Now, summer is an especially long season, at least the way that Hollywood divides the calendar year. Hollywood’s summer lasts from the first Friday in May through Labor Day, typically about 122 days (that is, a third of the year). So of course you’d expect more movies to be released then. Even if you adjusted for the number of days in each season, though, summer still has a disproportionately high number of tent-pole movies released. Here’s the same data from the chart above, adjusted for number of days in each season each year:

Source: Box Office Mojo. Go here for season definitions.

As you can see, summer and the holiday season usually have a higher number of these mega-release movies per day. And this summer took the cake, with an average of 0.25 films playing on at least 3,000 screens per day.

I mentioned earlier, of course, that consumer demand for moviegoing increases during the summer. And box-office revenues are indeed higher during the summer, typically about 40 percent of the calendar year’s total domestic gross. Studios see this higher summertime gross and think that the best way to maximize their tent-pole movie’s potential audience is to release sometime in that early-May-through-Labor-Day window.

This reasoning is flawed, though, and not only because films face more competition during the summer season (which means studios are chasing after a smaller share of what appears to be a slightly bigger pie). The other issue is that the box-office pie might be bigger in the summer precisely because the tent-pole films are released then. As I write in the magazine article, the expected box-office appeal of the movie could be driving the release date, instead of the release date’s causing the box-office performance.

In economics and statistics, this problem is referred to as endogeneity. Use that jargon around any academic and you’ll get lots of Brownie points. But people in the regular world, including studio executives and even lowly journalists, have a lot of trouble wrapping their heads around the concept when figuring out how to parse past trends.

Liran Einav, an economics professor at Stanford, wrote his dissertation on seasonal swings in the movie industry and tried to get around this problem by controlling for film quality (that is, the likely box-office appeal of a movie). He concluded that about a third of the seasonal swing in moviegoing was due to the release of films with wider appeal at the same times each year. The other two-thirds of the swing is indeed due to potential audiences’ being bigger on times like Memorial Day weekend or Christmas week (because of school breaks, etc.).

It’s not as if studios always saved their biggest movies for release in the summer and holiday seasons, by the way.

Pretty much everyone I spoke with in the industry dates this industry mind-set back to “Jaws,” the original summer blockbuster. It was released in late June 1975, around the time of year that the events depicted in the film also took place. After “Jaws” broke all sorts of box-office records, it helped change the conventional studio strategy in releasing blockbusters.

If you look at the highest-grossing movie each year going back to the early 20th century, you’ll see what appears to be a turning point in the thinking about when to release big blockbusters around the time that “Jaws” swam into the picture.

Sources: The Numbers; IMDb; Box Office Mojo. Blue dashed line is the year that “Jaws” came out. Go here for season definitions.

In the 50 years before “Jaws,” only 20 percent of the time was the year’s highest-grossing movie released in what is now considered the summer season.

After “Jaws,” the summertime hits started to become much more frequent. In subsequent years, the highest-grossing movie each year was a summer release more than 60 percent of the time.

And lately studios and distributors have appeared even keener on releasing their biggest films in the summer, as you can tell from the fact that there were so many tent poles released this summer. In fact, in the last decade, summer has been the setting for the year’s highest-grossing film 80 percent of the time, with the holiday season contributing the other 20 percent.

(Note: For a few films, the best way to categorize the season of opening is ambiguous, because sometimes there was a gap of several weeks or months between the premiere in New York or Los Angeles and a wider release, particularly in the earlier parts of the 20th century. There are not enough cases where the premiere and wide-release dates fell in different seasons to substantially change the patterns above, though.)