Winners/Losers

Since it's "Labor Day Box Office" time, let's examine end-of-summer box office:

4 losers and 3 winners from a lousy summer at the box office

The 2016 summer movie season very nearly broke records for how poorly its movies performed

... Captain America was the first big movie of the summer, and it still sank fairly rapidly at the box office. The summer’s top hit in the US, Finding Dory, was the first big family release in several weeks, and that also goes for the season’s third biggest movie, The Secret Life of Pets. ...

If you look at the top 10 films for the year at the worldwide box office, only one of them — the enjoyable Chinese comedy The Mermaid (which came and went without making much noise in the US and deserved better) — isn’t about talking animals or superheroes.

The other nine? Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, The Jungle Book, Finding Dory, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Deadpool, The Secret Life of Pets, Suicide Squad, and X-Men: Apocalypse. ...

It's an ongoing theme. On this planet at this time, there are only two styles for summer mega-hits: spandex-clad do-gooders accompanied by lots of animated visual effects, and animation features loaded with animated visual effects.

When you're talking grosses of $500 million and up, that's the whole ball game.

Of course, there are also small to mid-budget movies without animation that (honest to God) occasionally hit a clean single or double and therefore make money, but those are, more often than not, small and happy accidents.