00:002016 was 10 years ago, a year known for poor political choices that we are still dealing with,
00:05my comment section is going to be a dumpster fire, and a lot of cool celebrities died.
00:08One aspect I don't think is discussed enough was the summer blockbuster season that year.
00:13In 2016, the summer blockbuster season was kind of mixed.
00:17Despite raking in $4.483 billion, it was less than 2015's $4.484 billion cube.
00:26It also had a slew of financial and critical turkeys.
00:29While not as trendsetting as, say, the summer of 1982 or 1989,
00:34I believe that summer of 2016 was an important year not just for the movies, but culture as well.
00:38Now let's look at the films that were on offer during the summer of 2016.
00:43It was the Age of Superhero films with Captain America Civil War, Suicide Squad, and X-Men Apocalypse.
00:47We had a lot of sequels like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Out of the Shadows, Neighbours 2,
00:51Finding Dory, The Conjuring 2, Independence Day Resurgence, Ice Age Collision Corps,
00:55Star Trek Beyond, Jason Bourne, Mechanic Resurrection, The Purge, Election Year,
01:00Now You See Me 2, and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
01:02Following it up on that, we had remakes and reboots as well.
01:05The Ghostbusters reboot, another Ben-Hur adaptation, the live-action Pete's Dragon,
01:10the live-action Jungle Book, Steven Spielberg's BFG, and The Legend of Tazan.
01:142016 was also a banner year for horror movies, with films like Don't Breathe and Lights Out,
01:18coming out along with a good glut of animated films like Kubo and the Two Strings, Sausage Pie, and Secret
01:22Life of Pets.
01:23One of the big film stories that year was the Ghostbusters reboot, and the discourse around it.
01:28Due to being a reboot of the Big 8 used to nerd property, and that it starred women in the
01:32main roles,
01:32it caused a big old whinge from the internet that led to harassment and online abuse against the cast and
01:37crew.
01:37This, along with Gameagate in 2014, were one of the first online controversies to gain ground,
01:42and make enough noise to be noticed outside.
01:44It basically created the online grifting industrial complex we have now,
01:48and maybe those big personalities are still making noise and still grifting.
01:52It's also a common sign of an election year where one party in Canada was a woman,
01:55didn't help but heighten the entire ruckus.
01:57It was a flashpoint. A stupid flashpoint.
01:59Another big takeaway was that superhero movies were expanding.
02:02Captain America Civil War made $1.155 billion at the box office,
02:06and it is the most impactful film out of that year's cycle.
02:09Not only was it the film that introduced Chadwick Boseman's Black Panther and Tom Holland's Spider-Man,
02:13it also showed the Roosevelt Rollers could handle a big team-up movie,
02:16and thus they got the Avengers Infinity War and Endgame jobs,
02:19and are going to helm the upcoming Avengers Doomsday and sequel Secret Wars.
02:23It also saw other superhero franchises try and keep up with the P.U. if that wasn't Marvel.
02:27During the summer, DC tried to quarter-correct off the response to Batman v Superman
02:31by making its summer movie Suicide Squad a bit more lighter,
02:34which resulted in a notorious round of reshoots being made.
02:36These types of shenanigans would plague other DC Extended Universe movies
02:40like Justice League and The Flash down the line.
02:42It was also a box office success,
02:44raking in $749.2 million and earning a spin-off film
02:48in The Much Better Birds of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation of one Harley Quinn,
02:52and a sequel, James Gunn's The Suicide Squad,
02:54which led to the Peacemaker show and him getting the reins to the DC Universe as a whole,
02:58with Viola Davis maintaining her role as a Mad Waller in that series.
03:01We also had an X-Men film, X-Men Apocalypse,
03:04which felt more like an afterthought with the MCU and DCEU chugging along
03:07and the X-Men movies feeling a bit passe,
03:10especially so much between Deadpool and Logan doing different takes on the superhero genre.
03:14It was also at this point the X-Men movies were also trying to be a cinematic universe,
03:18but that didn't come into fruition, but that's a story for another time.
03:21Horror movies also did well during the 2016 blockbuster season.
03:24I mean, horror movies always do well,
03:25they're cheap to produce and wield high-end results at the box office.
03:28Films like Conjuring 2 and Lights Out did well,
03:30and even adjacent films like The Shallows were well received.
03:33Animation also did well,
03:34Fondori was a big hit,
03:35but we also had some interesting films like the stop-motion film Kubo and the Two Strings from Laika,
03:39and the adult-themed Sausage Party.
03:40But looking back on the blockbuster season 10 years ago,
03:43I feel like there's another element that wasn't talked about much then,
03:46but you can still see the effects now.
03:47The movies had competition.
03:49While films have always had competition before,
03:51from the likes of TV and video games,
03:52streaming was becoming a big thing around this time.
03:54It was during the summer that Netflix's biggest show Stranger Things started airing,
03:57and other shows were coming out as well,
03:59with more budgets than a normal TV show.
04:01Shells like Game of Thrones were hitting their stride as well.
04:03Writing in RogerEbert.com,
04:04writer Jessica Ritchie discussed this.
04:06The rise of cable networks wanted to spend serious money on shows like Game of Thrones,
04:10further dense Hollywood's ability to be the main supplier of big stories,
04:14but changing trends are only excused so far.
04:16Hollywood did itself no favours by making the mid-budget film virtually extinct,
04:20requiring themselves to lean on business models,
04:22where a single film must hit a billion dollars to be considered success.
04:25If audiences can't get enough shows like Stranger Things or Outlander,
04:28you are not going to win them back with offerings like Legend of Tarzan or Ghostbusters.
04:31TV started to get more cinematic,
04:33and doing itself started to eat into the cinematic landscape,
04:35and started to create competition for the movie industry,
04:37especially taking the place of the mid-budget movie for the adult crowd.
04:40While they did make movies,
04:42they didn't find their niche until the later years,
04:44Netflix was starting to get hard in the realm of movies.
04:46Not for smaller projects,
04:48but it was the start of an era of streaming movies as well.
04:50The 2016 summer blockbuster season,
04:52which might not be well remembered as, say,
04:54the fabled summers of 1982 or 1989,
04:56but I believe it was still impactful in other ways that we are still seeing today.
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