“Film is Far from Dead: The Blockbuster’s Health in Summer ’16”

If you ask most critics and movie nerds, the summer of 2016 is the worst summer for movies of all time, ever. At first blush, you get where they’re coming from, too: There were a lot of shit films this summer, from Suicide Squad to Warcraft to The Legend of Tarzan, and that’s just naming a few out of many. It doesn’t help, either, that most of the big tentpole pictures released week in and week out by studios hoping to snag a few extra bucks were generally the worst of the bunch; these being the movies that most regular human beings went to see emphasizes that sense of overarching shit-ness. 

But was the summer really that bad? Mixed among the mainstream pablum, we had movies like Swiss Army Man, The Fits, Little Men, Kubo and the Two Strings, Hell or High Water, Morris from America, and so on. And if the summer really was that bad, does it fucking matter? Is it bad in the way that the meteor that killed all the damn dinosaurs was bad, or bad in the way that movies just tend to be crappy in cycles, and once one cycle ends, another begins, and we all go on with our lives? I think the second one, but in more complicated and nuanced terms, so you’ll have to cut me off here and just go dive into the big thing I wrote for (who else?) Paste Magazine.