There was a rather nasty chill in the air when the summer season officially kicked off back in early May. After last year’s Barbenheimer mania (the two films made almost $2.4bn combined) proved for the umpteenth time that yes, cinema really was back, the industry hoped and prayed that the historically most profitable few months of the year would once again pay off.

But initial big bets made little money and we were flooded with alarmist headlines insisting that cinema was really not back after all (despite spring hits like Dune: Part Two, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Kung Fu Panda 4). It turned out that was, unsurprisingly, not the case but was a later boost enough to save the whole season?

Here’s what we can learn from this summer’s box office:

Disney’s kingdom is magic again

The grip once exerted by the House of Mouse – at its tightest when Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars films were all packing ’em in – had slowly, if not completely, lost its strength in recent years. There have been major disappointments across the board, from animated (Wish, Strange World, Lightyear) to live-action (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Marvels, Haunted Mansion) and as Disney celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, there seemed like very little to be celebrating.

But as some pundits were ready to dismiss this summer as a bummer, Disney’s run of good luck began. While it might not have reached the loftier heights of previous sequels, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes ended up as a modest hit ($397m globally) before weeks later, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 became a certified phenomenon ($1.6bn globally). It broke a string of records – it’s now the biggest animated film of all time – and outgrossed other late-stage pandemic hits like Top Gun: Maverick and Barbie. The lesson for Disney might end up being a bleak one, all about the power of sequels (Toy Story 5, Frozen 3 and Moana 2 are already on the way) but it was an encouraging reminder that a huge, and diverse, audience will rush out to see the right Pixar movie without waiting for it to land on Disney+ (an increasing concern in recent years).

The following month, Disney scored the other $1bn hit of the summer: Deadpool & Wolverine, a Marvel film that wisely ridiculed a subgenre of which audiences had grown steadily tired, was another record magnet, becoming the biggest R-rated film of all time (its $1.2bn gross will probably end up far larger when it finally leaves cinemas). Its success showed a new way forward for the MCU, even if such enthusiasm might be very specifically aimed at Deadpool and its star Ryan Reynolds himself. Then finally, at the tail end of the season, Disney scored another hit with an inherited Fox franchise in Alien: Romulus ($225m and counting). The younger, more straightforward midquel is close to outgrossing Alien: Covenant and with international numbers soaring (it has become the second-biggest US film in China this year, outdoing Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4), it might end up close to Prometheus numbers yet with a budget that is $50m lower.

Disney’s successes might all be somewhat easy wins given the franchises involved but the variety of their output, thanks to the Fox purchase, and the numbers achieved (it’s estimated the studio accounts at least 42% of this season’s overall box office) puts them in the best place they’ve been in for years.

Blake and Ryan are the power couple to beat

It made sense that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, best friends to Taylor Swift, would find a way to similarly monopolise pop culture conversation this summer, with any column inches left by the music superstar taken up by these two instead. Even Swift herself got involved with the trajectories of their movies, donating a song to Lively’s glossy relationship drama It Ends With Us and endorsing Reynolds’s antihero threequel Deadpool & Wolverine on Instagram.

While it was no real surprise that a cameo-stuffed Deadpool sequel would become a smash, with or without the help of Swifties, the impassioned, Lively-led adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us was less of a sure thing, especially internationally. But the $25m-budgeted Sony film has so far made $243m worldwide, becoming the star’s biggest hit to date, also outgrossing bigger-budgeted summer offerings like Furiosa and The Fall Guy. The pair also became the first married couple to hold the top two spots at the US box office since Demi Moore and Bruce Willis in 1990.

The couple’s pop culture domination was aided by both fanboy and tabloid speculation – is Blake playing Lady Deadpool? Did Ryan write that rooftop scene for her? Is anyone on the set of It Ends With Us still talking to each other? – as well as the age-old summer trick of counter-programming, the two films crossing off both male and female audiences. The success of It Ends With Us is the more fascinating and encouraging of the two; it shows execs that hit female-led books shouldn’t always be turned into 10-part streaming series, and proves that big, emotion-heavy melodramas can be moneymakers once again. Despite her infrequent acting roles, it also showed a reliable fanbase for Lively, which is encouraging for Lionsgate, who have her returning for next year’s A Simple Favor 2, good news they most certainly need right now …

Lionsgate failed to roar

There were a number of worryingly expensive summer disappointments this year but two of the biggest, and most embarrassing, came from Lionsgate, a smaller studio that has struggled outside of its banner brands. While John Wick, Saw and Hunger Games films still make their mark, attempts to spin other new franchises have tanked and this summer was no different.

The first was a long-gestating adaptation of the video game Borderlands, from the director Eli Roth, which boasted an unusual cast ranging from the Oscar-winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis to the comedians Kevin Hart and Jack Black to the ex-Showgirl Gina Gershon. With an estimated budget of around $110m, it has so far made $25m worldwide, a disastrous result that will probably lose the studio about $30m (international pre-sales helped to cover some of the rest). The second was another lethargically made franchise non-starter, a critically reviled reboot of The Crow which opened to just $4.6m last weekend in the US, a sorry result for a film with a $50m budget. While Lionsgate has less invested in this one – it was a $10m acquisition and they spent an estimated $15m on marketing – it’s still a mess. (Lionsgate also suffered a pre-summer bomb with The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare making just $27m from a $60m budget.)

Both films shared similar problems – tortured productions, release delays, terrible reviews, a miscalculated mostly younger male fanbase – and should cause the studio to think twice before planning another pricey franchise launch.

Longlegs had long legs

2024 has been an unusually scary year for horror movies at the box office, with the traditionally reliable low-budget/high-profit genre stumbling with underperformers. In the US, The First Omen ($20m), Immaculate ($23m), The Watchers ($19m), MaXXXine ($15m) and Cuckoo ($6m) all stumbled and what had once seemed like easy money was now a harder go.

But in July, after an ingeniously restrained and inventive marketing campaign, Neon’s serial killer chiller Longlegs became a surprise smash, racking up more than $100m worldwide and becoming the highest-grossing independent film of the year. It’s an unusually impressive result for an original movie, especially given how it leans toward the artier end of the horror spectrum and, while the writer-director Osgood Perkins has offered mixed messages in regards to a sequel, its success should urge other studios to think outside of the box in the future (the horror streamer Shudder also scored two minor hits this year by doing the same – Late Night With the Devil and In a Violent Nature).

Will Smith is back!

There had been some rather over-cautious questions over Will Smith’s bankability ever since the dreaded slap, with rumours that Netflix pressed pause on an action film he was supposed to lead and that the fourth Bad Boys film was experiencing delays after internal concerns at Sony. And while the star’s first movie post-Oscars – Apple’s slavery drama Emancipation – might have been a washout, his return to his most successful long-term franchise proved that audiences were not as fussed as some had anticipated.

Despite carrying the biggest budget of any instalment to date with $100m, June’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die became one of the summer’s easiest success stories making over four times that worldwide. It fell short of its predecessor by $24m but was still a reminder of Smith’s long-lasting box office appeal and another piece of good news for Sony coupled with It Ends With Us (hits they needed with Harold and the Purple Crayon cratering at $23m worldwide). Smith’s next film – an I Am Legend sequel pairing him with Michael B Jordan – should make for another easy win.

But other older stars are not

The first big disappointment of the summer arrived with two stars who were coming off a momentous one last year: Barbie’s Ryan Gosling and Oppenheimer’s Emily Blunt. The two led a new take on the 80s TV show The Fall Guy, which underwhelmed upon release, opening below expectations and ending up with $180m globally but from a bloated $125m. It’s estimated to lose Universal up to $60m.

It kicked off a number of similarly high-budget disappointments led by big stars over the age of 40. The first instalment of Kevin Costner’s partly self-funded western Horizon did so poorly that the second was taken off the release schedule, making just $34m worldwide (the two films come with a $100m price tag). Apple partnered with Sony for the theatrical release of $100m-budgeted space race romcom Fly Me to the Moon, bringing together Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, but it stalled at $41m worldwide. Tatum later struggled to entice enough of an audience to see his fiancee Zoë Kravitz’s twisty thriller Blink Twice, which opened to just $7.3m last weekend. Elsewhere, Russell Crowe’s supernatural horror The Exorcism ($9m), Diane Keaton’s comedy Summer Camp ($2.5m) and Susan Sarandon and Bette Midler’s comedy The Fabulous Four ($3.4m) all underperformed as well.

It was a similar story last year when Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro and the Book Club ladies all faced a lack of audience interest and further puts into question what the masses want from their stars at this time. After the surprise success of last December’s raunchy romcom Anyone But You, Glen Powell continued his ascent with this summer’s hit sequel/reboot Twisters, a film sold equally on the promise of chaotic weather scenes and the presence of a bright new star (Powell at 35 also enjoyed Netflix success this summer with Hit Man). Some of the biggest streaming hits of the season were led by older, one-time box office draws – Atlas with Jennifer Lopez, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F with Eddie Murphy, The Idea of You with Anne Hathaway – suggesting once again that an audience for established stars does exist but it might no longer be one willing to head to the cinema.