2012 Summer Movie wrap-up: The Avengers and the art house save an otherwise mediocre summer movie season.

This is actually a pretty simple summer movie season to analyze and/or dissect.  In short, the expected mega-blockbusters were indeed mostly mega-blockbusters, the expected middle-of-the-road hits were just that, while the films pegged most likely to flop or at least financially disappoint did just that.   If you had polled pundits at the beginning of the summer over the top four films of summer 2012, you they probably would have told you some combination of The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Brave.  And three of those films did pretty much what should have been realistically expected of them.  The core artistic pattern of summer 2012 was pretty simple: Most of the mainstream entries, even the ones expected to soar, ended up being artistically disappointing while the indie scene was on fire all season long.  Speaking financially, audiences embraced most of the major art-house films while being just a little pickier when it came to mainstream fare.  But the biggest news of summer 2012 was the general success of old-school movies, as a number of original properties and/or star vehicles proved quite profitable.  I've written extensively elsewhere about the slow and steady return of the 'movie' so I won't dwell on that here (essay and essay).  But when Magic Mike is a smash hit while a Total Recall remake is a money loser, one hopes that the studios will take note and perhaps learn a lesson different than "Let's make a sequel to Magic Mike!".

Weekend Box Office: Dark Knight Rises tops, Total Recall flounders, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid 3 opens ok.

In the face of two relatively non-mighty openers, The Dark Knight Rises (review/spoiler-review) topped the weekend box office again with $36 million.  As has been the case throughout the film's much-debated run (which is really only 17 days old), it's doing pretty spectacular by any logical standard but must be defended from those who think it automatically should have topped The Dark Knight and/or challenged The Avengers.  The film has $354 million after three weekends, versus The Dark Knight ($393 million) and The Avengers ($457 million).  It's the third-biggest 17-day total of all-time, closely surpassing Avatar ($352 million) as the third-fastest film to reach $350 million.  It will crack $400 million in two or three weekends (surely the fourth-fastest movie to do so if it can in less than Shrek 2's 43 days) and anything after that is merely bragging rights.  It may or may not crack $1 billion worldwide, with around $700 million so far and holding up relatively well.  Despite my concerns following its Harry Potter/Twilight-esque opening weekend, it's already having a leggier run than any recent Harry Potter or Twilight Saga sequel, as well as Spider-Man 3 (2.2x its weekend) or Iron Man 2 (2.4x times its weekend).  It'll out gross Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith ($380 million) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II ($381 million) around next weekend.  It will probably outgross Transformers 2 ($402 million), Spider-Man ($403 million), and The Hunger Games ($405 million) by the end of the month, with Toy Story 3 ($415 million), The Lion King ($422 million), and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($423 million) waiting on tap if it can keep those non-IMAX screens during the end-of-August deluge.  So relax Bat-fans, it's doing just fine.