War of the Months: June

Well folks it's the last Monday in June so that means that it's time for another installment of the War of the Months, our year-long look at the films and box office stats of every single month of the year. Hoorah! This Month we're looking at June, this weird Summer Middle Month that is still filled with some pretty huge flicks.

June: The Middle Month

There is so much crap happening in June that movies tend to take a backseat more than they do in the bigger Summer Months of May or July. There's graduations, reunions, weddings, picnics and all kinds of crap. It gets a little hairy to get out to the movies. Through it all there is a good amount of big movies though, it IS Summer, after all. June tends to be underrated as a month in general, it's secretly this really warm, really nice month that most kids ignore because they still have to go to fucking school all day. By this time though, June can really wind up and in between finals and Aunt Judy's third wedding there are some big flicks out there.

June Bank: Plenty to Go Around

The biggest June ever was 2009 which brought in a nice $1,086,729,130. This is actually a bit higher than May's grand total and its average does tend a little better. There is generally less huge event movies or epic cultural tentpoles. That 2009 was filled mostly with movies that people didn't expect to do as insanely well as they did, including The Hangover, The Proposal and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

More than meets the eye

The Top Ten June Weekends ever include only one of these, but as you can see, it tends to be the month that Pixar dumps its biggest cash prizes, including both installments of the Cars franchise, Toy Story 3 (2010), Wall-E (2008) and Ratatouille (2007). In addition, the best June releases tend to be movies that studios may have hoped to do well but weren't sure things like the May filled with Star Wars, X-Men and Indiana Jones. There's Kung Fu Panda (2008), Hulk (2003), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and The Karate Kid (2010). Rounding out the Top Ten is the only Harry Potter movie ever to debut in June (as well as the one that's made the least money...actually my favourite one), Prisoner of Asskaban (2004).

The thing about June is that it's always been like this. It's a month of originals. May has all these classic tentpole franchises like Back to the Future and Spider-Man but June used to be the Summer Kick-Off with titles like Batman Returns (1992), Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lion King (1994). It used to be that Summer started in June. Then studios decided that it could start in May. Why not? It's warm enough.

June Bugs:

There are a whole lot of good June flicks, by this point any indie Oscar film is certainly out of the running, it's all blockbusters here, baby. After all, this is Jaws Month. Here following now are the best ever June Releases:

#10: Minority Report - 06/21/2002
#9: The Truman Show - 06/05/1998
#8: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - 06/04/1982
#7: The Bourne Identity - 06/14/2002
#6: The Lion King - 06/15/1994
#5: Wall-E - 06/27/2008
#4: The Hangover - 06/05/2009
#3: Ghostbusters - 06/08/1984
#2: Jurassic Park - 06/11/1993
#1: JAWS - 06/20/1975

Stick an Oxygen Tank in there!

Naturally I give honourable mentions to Total Recall (1990), Knocked Up (2007), Predator (1987), Nacho Libre (2006) and Speed (1994). Nice mix in there. Needless to say, June is also the Month of JAWS, the foundation for all blockbusters and probably the most significant industry-changing film of the past forty years. JAWS provided the paradigm for Summer Releases, marketing, box office expectations and the cultural impact of an event film. It's stunning to this day and no movie since has paired dinero with quality quite like it.

So that's it for June. July is up next which is of course the biggest movie month EVER so stay tuned, folks, it gets much crazier from here on out.