Summer recently ended and with it finished the biggest season for the U.S. Box Office. This time period is generally considered to run between the first weekend of May and the end of Labor Day weekend. While this spans only a third of the year this summer season contributes close to half of the total annual U.S. box office. Unfortunately the amount of tickets sold this summer was the least since 1997. Based on total gross revenues however, this summer was above 2009 by a scant 0.2%. Comparing the entire year of 2010 so far to 2009 (up through the end of week 36) revenues are up a more decent 4%. The better cumulative performance is thanks mostly to Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and other movies that drew strong crowds during the first 17 weeks of the year.

The fact is that the time between January and May hold the greatest potential for growth given its lower historical performance. Double-digit year-over-year growth occured during the first 9 weeks of 2009 and again during the adjoining 7 week “Spring” period of 2010. Hollywood has been slowly and steadily releasing more bigger budget titles during this period, and over the next five years there may be a smaller difference between the business generated here and during the summer season.

Still, the summer is where the action is and this summer also had some high expectations to live up. Just two years ago The Dark Knight was released (see the large spike during week 29 of 2008) and made the biggest opening weekend of all time. There were also strong titles during the summer 2009 like of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Star Trek which provided a strong start to the season (note the large spikes around $200 million between weeks 18 and 21 of 2009). In comparison the 2010 summer had a very poor start, puncuated by the worst Memorial Day weekend in 15 years (note week 23 of 2010 on the graph for the complete aftermath of that debacle).

I believe that this pitiful performance over was due to the low-quality of films released that weekend: Sex and the City 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time have already faded from memory if not from their studios’ balance sheets. I still think that if Fox missed a big opportunity by not releasing The A-Team, a underrated action movie with a recognized brand on Memorial Day weekend- “four soldiers of fortune” is about as appropriate as it gets. I guess research indicated that B.A. Barracus wouldn’t stand up to Carry’s fanclub and videogamers. The real challenge for the studios is to drive a low-quality movie in front of bad reviews which are gaining more steam every day from internet chatter (site reviews, Facebook comments, bad Tweets, etc.). It’s so easy to get word-of-mouth circulating these days that I wonder how a studio can market against it.

For now the safer bet may be just to push releases towards the outer edges of summer and harboring only the strongest titles during Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. The tougher solution would be to fixing bad titles during production instead of during marketing.