As everyone knows, 2005 was an awful year of bloodletting for everyone in the movie business. With the exception of movies involving the Empire (Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) or the emperors (March of the Penguins), this was one of the worst summers in history at the box office, the pundits and studios cried.
The reason? Many theories have been offered in the press, but the conventional wisdom now is that the current movies are simply no good. The studios have delivered nothing but garbage — TV adaptations, boring historical epics and general lousiness — to a moviegoing public that is content instead to spend those hot summer nights in front of the TV, where the mediocre escapism of Hollywood fare looks like a better bargain when it comes in DVD form (and you don’t have to pay $7 for refreshments).
Here at Rotten Tomatoes, we wouldn’t venture to posit that it’s the movies themselves that are the crux of the problem (we haven’t seen all of them). We can only go by what the critics say. And what they say will shock you: this summer’s movies received slightly better reviews than last year.
Summer Tomatometer Averages for the Last Five Years
————————————————————-
2005 | wide: 45.0% | limited: 70.8% | all films: 57.9%
2004 | wide: 41.8% | limited: 70.5% | all films: 56.2%
2003 | wide: 43.3% | limited: 71.2% | all films: 57.3%
2002 | wide: 46.9% | limited: 72.3% | all films: 59.6%
2001 | wide: 43.9% | limited: 67.9% | all films: 55.9%
For those cineastes out there who believe that the public is utterly foolhardy in its collective moviegoing taste, take note: the top five highest grossing films of the summer were also among the best reviewed (and that’s not a recent trend; a number of the highest grossers over the past five years have gotten great marks from the critics). And the average Tomatometer for all wide releases is 44.95 percent, up from 41.78 percent for 2004’s wide releases.
As the carefree days of summer recede into memory, and the sharp bite of the autumn wind brings the prestige pictures and Oscar hopefuls, we at RT will spend this first full week of October, microscope in hand, scrutinizing what was right and wrong with this year’s biggest movie season.
