Summer box office 2022: what lessons can Hollywood learn?

theguardian.com:

As soon as Doctor Strange 2 unofficially kicked off the summer season back in late April with the second-biggest opening weekend of the pandemic, sighs of relief started to spread across the industry and continued until August.

It was the season that confirmed that, as many of us already knew, nope the cinema experience isn’t dead and with records being broken throughout the summer, it’s not looked this alive for some time. But there were enough misses alongside the hits to show that in some areas, things aren’t quite as healthy.

Here are the key lessons of the season:

There was understandable caution surrounding the belated release of Top Gun: Maverick, an expensive, much-delayed sequel (announced in 2010, filmed in 2018) to an 80s film that wasn’t exactly calling out for one. Tom Cruise’s box office appeal outside of the Mission: Impossible films has been so spotty that he barely makes anything but Mission: Impossible films now and while the original holds a firm place in Hollywood history, it’s not received a noticeable second life with the advent of streaming. So there were dropped jaws all around when back in May, it not only opened big but opened bigger than anything Cruise has ever starred in before, flying high for the rest of the summer, making $1.3bn globally and counting (it recently surpassed Titanic to become the seventh biggest film of all time in the US).

Rightwingers laughably claimed such success was down to the film being pro-America and “anti-woke” (a dumb assertion that fails to correlate with other monster hits that have embraced more diversity) but its popularity can be more easily traced to two things. First, unlike other follow-ups to dusted off classics, the entry point for Maverick was far easier