3) Inside Out
Pete Docter is a swine isn’t he? The Inside Out / Up director must be responsible for the shedding of more tears than any director since Steven Spielberg put ET back on the spaceship and sent him home.
Many of those tears would have come via sobs of relief, now that Pixar has finally got its act together after a slew of sequels and prequels seemed to have robbed them of their ability to create masterpieces. Inside Out is up there with the best of their work and, as should be expected in a film about emotions, it took its audience on a heightened thrill ride of laughs, tears, fear, elation, emptiness, shock and adoration.
There are two Pixar films out this year (The Good Dinosaur is out in November): talk about being spoiled.
2) Avengers: Age of Ultron
And at number 1, obviously, it’s the immensely anticipated sequel to the third biggest hit of all time Aven…oh wait. Oh dear.
It’s testament to just how mighty a box office colossus Marvel Studios is that a $191m opening weekend and a $457m total feel like a disappointment. Nonetheless, there was a general feeling that director Joss Whedon might have missed the target second time around.
Age of Ultron lacked the tight focus of the original, cluttered as it was with too many characters with too many agendas. The carnage and destruction was eventually just more of the same boring skyscraper-wrecking stuff we’ve been acclimatised to by four Transformers movies and the terrible ending in Man of Steel.
Gripes aside, it was still high-end popcorn entertainment and the party scene was genius, yet the mood at Marvel must now be slightly cautious. Combine this silver medal with the disappointing grosses for Ant-Man and the name-association with Fantastic Four, and like Spider-Man in the presence of Kryptonite*, Marvel suddenly and for the first time in years, looks a little vulnerable
(* I know. I just wanted to see what you’d do).
In any case, The Avengers is no longer the third biggest movie of all time, because of…
1) Jurassic World
There was a lot of talk about this being the summer of fun, when the spirit of the Golden Age of summer movies (84-93 approx) would return now that the years of Nolan-inspired moody, doom-laden beta-blockbusters seem to have run their course.
For all that, the only real connective tissue to the halcyon days of Spielberg / Lucas / Zemeckis / Landis et al was this, essentially the belated sequel to 2001’s Jurassic Park III, and a film whose wild and crazy journey to the screen has been given movie bloggers something to titter about for years.
Out of nowhere, we got Jurassic World and a lesson in how to treat your audience and shatter records in the process. A $208m opening weekend (the biggest ever) got the ball rolling and before long, it had become the fastest film to take a billion worldwide. With an eventual Stateside gross of $642,978m, Jurassic World overtook The Avengers to become the third highest-grossing film of all time.
In many ways, it was an even bigger phenomenon than Jurassic Park. Colin Trevorrow realised that the audience’s love for the original dino-romp was palpable and rewarded them not just with the dust-covered scenes set in the original park, but in recapturing the thrilling spirit of Spielberg’s film, via some witty discussion on the dislocation of modern teenagers and their refusal to be thrilled by anything that isn’t viewable on a touch-screen tablet. It must have been pretty amazing to watch this and to have been 14 years old.
However, the secret behind the astonishing and unprecedented success of Jurassic World can be summed up in two words: Chris Pratt. His vocal duties in The Lego Movie then the charm-explosion that was Guardians of The Galaxy made him instantly, though tacitly and without fanfare, the most exciting superstar to arrive in Hollywood since Will Smith. This, the Box Office Champion of 2015 (thus far…) is the icing on the cake. Doing much on June 22nd 2018? There’s a pretty good chance you’ll be going to see Jurassic World 2.
