A year and half ago, movie reviewers were focused on two summers: 2013 with Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel and Star Trek
Or so we thought.
A funny thing has happened in the ensuing 18 months. Summer 2013 kinda sucked. And this summer has been kind of great.
At least that's my own impression of things.Nothing I looked forward to last year delivered. Everything I anticipated this year has been solid if not spectacular. And the "eye test" of other movie reviews seemed to suggest the same. But is my gut accurate?
Time to bring in some numbers.
To start, I took what were advertised as the biggest releases in May and June of both 2013 and 2014. The list looked like this:
2013
- Iron Man 3
- The Great Gatsby
- Star Trek Into Darkness
- The Hangover Part III
- Fast & Furious 6
- Epic
- After Earth
- The Internship
- The Purge
- This Is the End
- Man of Steel
- World War Z
- Monsters University
- The Heat
- White House Down
2014
- Amazing Spider-man 2
- Neighbors
- Godzilla
- Million Dollar Arm
- X-Men: Days of Future Past
- Blended
- Malificent
- A Million Ways to Die in the West
- Edge of Tomorrow
- The Fault in Our Stars
- 22 Jump Street
- How to Train Your Dragon 2
- Think Like a Man 2
- Jersey Boys
- Transformers: Age of Extinction
I then averaged the Rotten Tomatoes scores for the movies from each year. So far, 2014 films are averaging 2.87 percentage points higher on Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer. Not a massive difference but still a difference.
What's more interesting to me though is the range of scores. Last summer's highest scoring film in June and July was Star Trek Into Darkness with 87%, followed by This Is the End with 83%. Everything else is below 80%. In contrast to that, 2014 has seen 3 movies with RT scores of 90% or higher (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Edge of Tomorrow, and How to Train Your Dragon 2), with 22 Jump Street and The Fault in Our Stars in the 80s. There are simply more quality movies this summer (at least based on this data).
The rest of the numbers are remarkably similar. Of the 15 films from each year, 7 are certified rotten at this point. Both years have 2 films below 20% (ugh).
Obviously, Rotten Tomatoes has limitations as a data source, but it's not a bad starting point. If a movie summer is defined by its best films, so far 2014 is eating 2013's lunch. Wouldn't it be fascinating if this year turned out to be the classic movie year we were all expecting last year and anticipating next year.
What are your thoughts? Other sources of info to use? Films you think should be on or off these lists? Is this a useful exercise?
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