This Is the Biggest Summer Movie Release Ever

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Aug 25, 3:11PM EDT · Published Aug 25, 10:30AM EDT

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This Is the Biggest Summer Movie Release Ever — © Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Except when movie theaters are closed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the summer movie release period is critical to the $11 billion the industry brings in from ticket sales every year. Some of the biggest releases are done over the three long weekends of the season: Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. If COVID-19 cases drop off in 2022, summer ticket sales will be a bonanza for an industry already challenged by the rise of streaming, as shelter from home viewership made a sharp upturn.

A few major movies set to be released in the next few weeks could still make summer 2021 something more than a bomb for theaters. These include “Candy Man,” “Beatles: Get Back,” “Malignant” and “Catch the Bullet.”

To determine the biggest summer release of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data on box office from the film industry site The Numbers. Summer-release movies were ranked based on lifetime domestic box office. Only films with domestic release dates in June, July or August were considered. Data on worldwide box office also came from The Numbers. Supplemental data on Tomatometer scores came from Rotten Tomatoes. Data on each film’s IMDb rating came from the Internet Movie Database. And film descriptions were drawn principally from Google and IMDb websites.
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The biggest summer movie release was “Jurassic World,” which hit theaters in 2015. Here are the details:

Domestic box office: $652.3 million
Worldwide box office: $1.7 billion
Tomatometer score: 71% (351 critic votes)
IMDb rating: 7.0/10 (585,222 audience votes)

In this film, Jurassic World is now a functioning dinosaur theme park built on the ruins of the original park. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the manager of the new park, welcomes her two nephews on a visit. But the nephews enter a restricted area and encounter the Indominus rex, a dinosaur made by a gene-altering procedure, and a highly lethal one.

Click here to see which were the biggest summer movie releases of all time.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.