10) Straight Outta Compton
Into the top ten with a bang. The NWA biography is still number one in the States after three weeks, and its current $135m take will only increase, placing this even higher in the eventual charts and making it THE big surprise of Summer 2015.
Expectations were top-loaded given the immense popularity of those pioneers of rap’s golden age, but nobody expected this. Compton has swatted away competition like Hitman: Agent 47, American Ultra and No Escape, and now has a clear run through most of September.
Can you hear that? That’s the sound of the Public Enemy and Flava Flav biographies being written as fast as human fingers can type.
9) Mad Max: Fury Road
For a while, no one really knew what to expect from this. A tortured production history, a director whose previous film was Happy Feet Two and a franchise that last made an appearance Beyond Thunderdome in 1985 with a currently unfashionable lead actor and a pretty terrible film?
All uncertainties vanished the night Fury Road premiered at Cannes and a tidal wave of effusive reviews began to crash through social media. With $153m in the trunk (plus another $221m from around the world) its blockbuster status is assured (as are Tom Hardy’s A-List credentials), but Warner’s can take some extra satisfaction that they bankrolled the most critically adored action film in over a decade.
8) San Andreas
Am I the only one to be surprised to see this place so high up the charts? Granted, it had the last weekend in May all to itself, but can anyone say they remember much about this effects-heavy earthquake flick, other than the irritation at seeing Paul Giamatti being wasted in yet another role that is clearly beneath him.
A less cynical view might be that San Andreas, with its ‘70s-era disaster movie ethos and impressive SFX is what summer movies are really all about: a colossal, thundering, rollercoaster of a Big Mac Meal that you can enjoy and forget about at the same time. An impressive $154m gross suggests that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s above-the-title status is well deserved.
7) Ant-Man
$169m is hardly small change, but this is Marvel we’re talking about. Iron Man Three took more than that in its opening weekend. This doesn’t bode well for Marvel’s Phase 3 line-up of less well known characters like Black Panther and Doctor Strange, especially since Ant-Man was easily the most fun to be had at the movies all summer.
Thrilling, inventive yet grounded in domestic reality, with a hugely likeable hero and an able and competent villain (plus Michael Douglas!), it’s difficult to see how this could have been made any better. I’ll wager that all those sensible folk who did go to see Ant-Man will be desperate to see him again – and indeed they will get their wish when Paul Rudd unshrinks in Captain America: Civil War.
6) Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
You know what? Let’s give Tom Cruise a break, shall we? It’s been ten years since that sofa-jumping idiocy and nobody has had a good word to say about him since.
A decade of underperforming movies – mostly pretty good, since you ask – has made the writing off of Thomas Mapother Cruise IV an annual event. Few people, even at Paramount, would have thought that the fifth film in a 19 year old franchise would break the spell but there it was, holding onto the top spot against all comers for two weeks in July with the tenacity of its star holding onto the side of an ascending Airbus 400.
Thrilling, relentless, funny (thank you, Simon Pegg), exotic and classy, it was pure adrenaline cinema and audiences chose to accept it to the tune of $170m and half a billion worldwide.
5) Pitch Perfect 2
The success of Pitch Perfect is a good example of the ‘Austin Powers Effect.’ To wit: a small-scale comedy does relatively well upon its cinema release, but enjoys a second wind on DVD and develops a vast and loyal fanbase who embrace it and give it a secondary, under the radar existence.
Thusly, the sequel performs disproportionately well against the grosses of the original. (Austin Powers (1997) – $53m. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) – $206m) The first Pitch Perfect took less than Battleship or John Carter in 2012, but its cast of memorable characters have become icons to the Glee generation, who arrived to see their heroes return in droves – $183m worth of droves – and made Pitch P3rfect all but inevitable.
Alas, the Austin Powers analogy was also reflected in the fact that the sequel was nowhere near as good as the original. IMO.
4) Minions
This was never not going to happen. The bite-sized Shredded Wheat shaped underlings from the phenomenally successful Despicable Me movies have become the most iconic, instantly recognizable cartoon creations since The Simpsons, mimicked by schoolchildren from Alaska to Adelaide so no one was surprised when Universal announced this spin-off movie.
It was a fair attempt, as spin-offs go (let’s face it, it’s not a redoubtable sub-genre at the best of times), and the first half was genuinely hilarious. Ultimately, the laughs didn’t hold out and its high placing ($324m) is more indicative of the good will towards the minions than audience satisfaction with the finished project. It’s a good time to be a Universal exec.
With Minions, Jurassic World, Trainwreck, Straight Outta Compton and Spring’s $1bn-generating Furious 7, they must really be looking forward to their Christmas bonuses this year.
