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Max Braden: I think going into the summer, Iron Man 3, Fast and Furious 6, and the animated movies looked like winners and turned out that way. I think on paper, After Earth seemed like it would have been a winner because of how well Will Smith performed with the post-apocalyptic world of I Am Legend. I'd call it the bigger flop than The Lone Ranger, which despite getting slammed by negative reviews, has still made plenty of money at the box office. The Great Gatsby is still the big surprise of the summer, earning a lot more than a movie of its genre would be expected to make.

David Mumpower: I too am fascinated by the shocking differential between the awful, terrible, heinous movies released from January-to-April and the solid batch of titles saved for the summer. The depth of the top ten is so powerful that $5 million does not guarantee a title placement therein. Compare that to last July when $5 million was regularly good enough for sixth to eighth place. Not only did the May and June releases uniformly perform well but they have had staying power to boot.

As always, I believe that trumpeting the global revenue is a bit misleading since those box office receipts are so much less profitable overall (an extreme example being that Disney receives only 25% of the gross of Iron Man 3 in China, making their actual profit less than 10%). If we focus on domestic revenue, the list of winners is dramatic. Starting with Iron Man 3's spectacular May debut, we could include the following titles as surefire box office winners: The Great Gatsby, Star Trek Into Darkness (albeit less so than expected), Fast and Furious 6, Now You See Me, The Purge, This Is the End, Monsters University, The Heat, Despicable Me 2, Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain, and Grown Ups 2. Arguably, two other titles could be included in this group. They are World War Z, which I think belongs but it's close, and Man of Steel, whose ultimate fate is probably a draw since the negative cost on it borders on unprecedented and they have already ceded some of the Blu-Ray revenue in advance.

Now compare the list above with the group of middling performers. Since the start of May, I would consider the entire list to be comprised of The Hangover III and Epic. Pacific Rim will probably slot into this group or the list of bombs, depending on what happens with it overseas. Since it was designed with foreign revenue as a focus, I have to give it more benefit of the doubt in this regard than the rest of the list. The bombs over the past 10 weeks are obvious. That group is After Earth, The Lone Ranger, White House Down, The Internship and Peeples. And the latter two movies are so slight as to border on irrelevant. In other words, I believe only eight mainstream releases during the summer box office campaign are anything other than winners, and half of those are either draws or statistically unimportant. Hollywood feeds off of its revenue during late December and the summer. Based upon those metrics, this is quite possibly the greatest holiday/summer combination ever. I am not discussing total dollars when I say that but instead overwhelming volume of successes. The outlier, the part that is difficult to explain, is why the January-to-April portion betwixt the two was so atrocious.

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