The summer after Barbenheimer and the strikes, Hollywood charts a new course
Expectations are tempered for the financial prospects of summer of 2024 at the movies
“ Barbenheimer ” is a hard act to follow. But as Hollywood enters another summer movie season, armed with fewer superheroes and a landscape vastly altered by the strikes, it’s worth remembering the classic William Goldman quote about what works: “Nobody knows anything.”
Four decades later, that still may be true. Yet one thing Hollywood has learned in releasing films through the pandemic and the strikes is how to pivot quickly.
The summer of 2023 brought a new enthusiasm for moviegoing, with the fortuitous counterprogramming of “Barbie” and “ Oppenheimer,” and surprise hits like “ Sound of Freedom,” helping the season’s box office crack $4 billion for the first time since 2019. But before the industry could take a victory lap, there was another crisis looming with the dual Hollywood strikes, which shuttered most productions for months.
In the fallout, theaters lost big summer titles like “Mission: Impossible 8,” “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Thunderbolts” to 2025. But they gained a gem in Jeff Nichols’ “The Bikeriders” (June 21), about a 1960s Midwestern motorcycle club, as studios moved films around on the summer chessboard. “Deadpool & Wolverine,” once set to kick off the summer moviegoing season on May 3 like many Marvel movies before it, is now sitting happily on July 26, patiently waiting to dominate the summer charts.
“I do love being right there in the belly of summer,” said director Shawn Levy. “That’s a juicy moment.”
The kickoff weekend instead belongs to an original film about a different kind of superhero. “ The Fall Guy,” starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, is part romantic-comedy, part action-comedy, and all
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