Summer 2012 was certainly an interesting time for cinema. So, which movies “popped” and which movies “flopped”?
Taking in only $36 million, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com), one flop is the Andy Samberg and Adam Sandler film, “That’s My Boy.” Michael O’Sullivan, a film critic at The Washington Post, said the film has “a focus so single-minded that the script sometimes seems to have been written by a 13-year-old.”
Adam Sandler’s career has been taking a slow fade. Just last year, Sandler’s film “Jack and Jill” earned him the Razzie awards for both Worst Actor and Worst Actress.
Another box office failure is the action/adventure film “Battleship” based on the Milton Bradley board game of the same name. IMDb statistics show that this film took in a very low $65 million in its U.S. run.
The plot is very shallow and seems as if someone gave a B-movie director a multi-million dollar budget to play around. Given these circumstances, “Battleship” is surprisingly entertaining if you like movies filled with plenty of explosions. According to Roger Ebert, a seasoned veteran of the film critic world, in a review for his personal website, “The film eventually comes down to lots of scenes in which things get blown up real good… “Battleship” is a more entertaining film… because it has slightly more fully fleshed characters, a better plot and a lot of naval combat strategy,” he said.
Not all movies this summer were box office disasters. IMDb suggests that the top highest grossing summer blockbusters are films based on comic book characters: Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.”
“The Avengers” earned an astounding $617 million, according to IMDb’s box office numbers. This does not at all seem surprising given that this film has been hinted at and hyped up for the past five years in the previous five “Avengers’” films leading up to Whedon’s superhero film. The well-deserved hype makes this film a must see, if you have not seen it already.
The next highest grossing film is the final installment in the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, “The Dark Knight Rises.” This film cashed in at $422 million, as of August 26th (IMDb). The movie stars Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne alongside many other great names such as Anne Hathaway as the beautiful, yet deadly “cat-burglar,” Selina Kyle. “The Dark Knight Rises” will not let us down with its blend of action and drama.
