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.

According to a Variety article that I commented on yesterday, during the past four years new sources of funding like private equity money have created a ‘surplus of movies’ that are forcing Hollywood to release ‘heavyweight’ movies across a wider spectrum of dates, other than on just around Easter, summer and the year-end holidays. During the past five years the biggest budget releases have normally been focused on these dates, but higher budget ceilings are slowly creeping up around other months.

The months of May, June and December stand out as being the points of highest investment. The three highest spikes in the graph are in May 2007, November 2008 and December 2009, respectively for Spider-Man 3 ($258 million), Quantum of Solace ($230 million) and Avatar ($250 million). August  was slow before 2007, before it was considered part of the summer blockbuster season.

Looking at the first quarter, with the exception of Astérix aux jeux Olimpiques in 2008, January held budgets below $70 million. In fact the last time Hollywood launched a January release with greater than a $75 million budget was in 2000 with Fantasia 2000. This February no studio released a major picture. March has seen the most steady rise, reaching $130 million this year with Watchmen. Inversely, April has been falling, perhaps since studios prefer to delay big releases until May.

Based on the extraordinary box office performance during the first quarter of 2009, perhaps studios will overcome their fear and place more blockbusters there in the future.

2009 could mark the first year that Hollywood breaks $10 billion in total U.S. Box Office sales. As of March 16, the total gross revenues are at $2.089 billion, 12.4% over the same point in 2008. If this pace is maintained, total U.S. Box Office will reach $10.771 billion by year end.

A January article at CNN.com speculated that this growth in movie attendance was due to a general desire to “escape” from the recession. A more recent article in Variety speculated that the boom was due to more big releases being launched after the Christmas season. I wanted to take a look for myself.

It was easy to find out how much money has been made to date for the current 2009 releases, but it was harder to tally the information for movies that were released in 2008, as well as tracking down the 2009 releases that had already closed out their run. For releases that came out before January 1, I had to substract their 2008 gross from their cumulative gross, and then add that into the pot. I did all this and then ran the same exercise for 2008. Since the information available was incomplete, I decided to limit the analysis to the top 80 grossers for each time period. The results are as follows.

It seems that the greatest growth has come from movies released before January, like Gran Torino, Slumdog Millionaire and Marley & Me. Pre-January releases like these have grossed 20% more during the window between January 1 and March 15 than Pre-January releases did in 2008.

At the same time movies released after January 1, 2009 have outperformed by 7% as compared to the same group in 2008. Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Taken have respectively taken in $138 million and $127 million. Not one movie in 2008 had made $100 by March 15; the biggest grosser at that point last year was Cloverfield, with $80 million. Big budget releases like 10,000 B.C. and Jumper didn’t seem to find their audiences.

Based on these figures it is difficult to say exactly why this growth is occurring. It might be escapism, it might be good movies. In any case it’s good news for Hollywood.