Summer Blockbuster Season Is About To Begin

The biggest time of year for movies is the summer season. It starts the first weekend in May and goes through August. We estimate the top 30 movies will gross $4.3 billion domestically and almost $11 billion at the foreign box office.

The 2015 Summer Blockbuster Scope listed the Top 20 films. This year, we were only able to narrow the list to 30 films. We boasted about the 2015 Summer being the “THE $UMMER OF $EQUEL$," well this summer is even more so. It's full of sequels, reboots and even a few films born from video games.

This summer there are 14 sequels on our list, and an important few come from the $uperheroe$ & $upervillain$ such as Capt. America, X-Men, TMNT and the Suicide Squad. And then there is the long-awaited Finding Dory (the sequel to the blockbuster from 2003, Finding Nemo) and Jason Bourne, the fifth Bourne flick to hit the big screen.

Related Link: CinemaCon 2016: Everything You May Have Missed

REBOOT & RE$HOOT

Remakes of well-regarded and successful films have increasingly become more popular. This summer has three can't-miss summer remakes.

Ghostbusters, a 1984 gem, is getting a makeover with an all-female reboot. The Tarzan story is over 100 years old with multiple remakes. This summer, The Legend of Tarzan will be the first film since the animated 1990 flick, Tarzan; kids & adults alike will love it! In 1989, an animated film verison of Roald Dahl’s children’s book The Big Friendly Giant (The BFG) was released. This summer’s The BFG is looking back and bigger than ever. It's so “big” that it's being directed by Spielberg.

This isn’t the first children’s book from Dahl to make it to the silver screen, you may recall James and the Giant Peach (1996), Matilda (1996), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and George Clooney & Meryl Streep in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).

FROM PHONE $CREEN$ TO THE BIG $CREEN$

Two films on our T-1 list are born from popular video games, The Angry Birds Movie and Warcraft.

The Angry Birds Movie is derived from the popular smartphone game “Angry Birds” that has had billions of downloads starting in late 2009. Since its release, there have been multiple versions of the game created for mobile devices. The game quickly became popular. In 2010 it had 12 million downloads. By 2014 it had been downloaded over 2 billion times. Merchandise, animated series, books and comic books were quick to the market. Angry Birds has been noted as the biggest success in mobile apps ever.

Warcraft the movie is based on the computer game franchise (1994-present) Warcraft. Over 100 million people have played the franchise’s most popular iteration, World of Warcraft. Warcraft’s best years were the mid-2000s reaching 12 million active subscribers. Today, there are ONLY about 5.5 million (5.5 million players at $15 a month is still $82.5 million a month) The Warcraft movie should draw new and old gamers to the film and coupled with a new game release this year, World of Warcraft: Legion, boost the games’ active players. It truly is a multi-media phenomenon.