© Provided by Forbes Media LLC 'Suicide Squad' image courtesy of Warner Bros.
‘Suicide Squad’ image courtesy of Warner Bros.
There are rumblings around the Internet about an early screening for Suicide Squad that yielded some positive buzz over the last few days. We’ve all heard of early preview screenings for fan-friendly audiences that turned up buzzy social media reactions bur turned out not to be quite in tune with the film’s final quality. The nature of the “reviews[1],” which are more “Hmm, that was pretty good.” or “Margot Robbie makes a great Harley Quinn.” as opposed to “OMG… YAAAS!” makes me inclined to take them at face value.
The would-be screening buzz, be it true or false, is just an excuse to jump into something of note: Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc.’s Suicide Squad, by being the last geek-centric blockbuster of the summer, has a distinct advantage. The key to its success may lie in how well the previous summer blockbusters entertain the masses and impress the tastemakers.
There are two big advantages that David Ayer’s supervillain team-up picture has merely as a matter of scheduling. First of all, it’s one of the last big movies of the summer. We’ve seen this many times over the years. It’s that big “better than we expected” blockbuster that opens toward the end of the summer and closes out the season. Think (among others) The Fugitive, Air Force One, Blade, The Sixth Sense, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It’s that last (or nearly last) big summer movie that turns out to be pretty darn good and thus runs out the clock on summer with no major mid-August competition to worry about.
Give-or-take Pete’s Dragon and a surprise from Ben-Hur, Suicide Squad marks the near-end of the summer blockbuster season in early August. So if it merits legs (and opens well), it is in a prime position to ride out the rest of the summer unencumbered by the next big movie dropping weekend after weekend. In this sense, going last is of better use than going first if you require legs.
Compare the weekend multipliers of Sony’s Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Warner’s Godzilla with Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the last biggie of summer 2014) and Walt Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy (the second-to-last biggie opening in the same slot as Suicide Squad). Obviously, Guardians wasn’t the MCU’s leggiest hit just because it went last, but it undoubtedly helped.
And Guardians was a big hit for another reason, one that may or may not pertain to this summer as well. Guardians of the Galaxy was a crowd-pleasing and well-reviewed blockbuster that came on the heels of a pretty underwhelming season.
Reasonable people can disagree about the artistic merits of Amazing Spider-Man 2, Godzilla, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Maleficent, and Transformers: Age of Extinction. But none of them set the world on fire regarding being that classic summer tentpole (you can make a case for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes or the early June underperformer Edge of Tomorrow, but humor me for a moment). Guardians of the Galaxy was just that, a classic summer tentpole flying to the rescue to provide that “one you’ve been waiting for.”
It happens from time to time in an underwhelming summer (or a summer where there is a huge gap between the last solid tentpole and the would-be summer savior). Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl was a “How exactly did this movie turn out to be this good?” juggernaut that came after around six weeks of summer doldrums. Inception was the answer to our prayers after one of the very worst summers I can remember (it was so bad that I started touting The Karate Kid as an Oscar contender, although I still think Jackie Chan deserved a nod).
Even Michael Bay’s Transformers offered a July 4th shot in the arm in 2007 after three blockbuster threequels (Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End) that made money without winning hearts and minds and were followed by a relatively middling June. It stands to reason that Suicide Squad stands to benefit from each would-be summer blockbuster that doesn’t set the world on fire.
If Suicide Squad is good, crowd-pleasing, and different enough from the conventional tentpole, every would-be X-Men: Apocalypse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Independence Day: Resurgence, Legend of Tarzan, Ghostbusters, Star Trek Beyond, and Jason Bourne that doesn’t click with audiences gives a waiting-in-the-wings Suicide Squad more power like a box office quickening.
It’s not a zero-sum game (again, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes played well, and X2 was one of the best summer kick-off movies of all time), and I certainly am not rooting for a season of disappointing tentpoles merely so I can watch Suicide Squad save the summer. My “Safe Bets” summer prediction column will look pretty silly if that happens. Nonetheless, that’s one advantage of being the last biggie out of the gate. If the rest of the season disappoints (and you don’t), you get to be the summer savior combined with that whole “no competition in mid-August” thing and ride out the season as a hero.
We’ll see how this all plays out in due time. But if Suicide Squad does as well as everyone hopes it’s going to do, and if it does indeed benefit from a somewhat leggy run compared to its early May brethren (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pulled nearly three times its $65m debut as the very last August tentpole two summers ago), we may see a mad dash to not just be the first big film of summer but also be among the last big movies of the summer.
Of course, that in itself may poison the well if August becomes as crowded as May or mid-July but that’s another “if-and-when” conversation. But one of Suicide Squad’s bigger trump cards may merely be its August release date, which both puts it in place to close out the summer as well as potentially be the “one we’ve been waiting for” if the rest of the biggies underwhelm. Suicide Squad opens on August 5th. We’ll see.