Nine of the greatest summer blockbusters of all time

Jaws

As Mark Kermode says, before Jaws was released in 1975, most “really, really big movies would tend to open at the end of the year,” when there was a chance of attracting awards attention. Few people expected Jaws to be a hit, least of all its director, Steven Spielberg. “The shoot started without a script, without a cast and without a shark,” says Mark. It may not have been a fun shoot for Spielberg, who had to contend with a repeatedly malfunctioning fake great white, but it demonstrated his mastery of cinema. He showed that shark only when essential, instead building tension with editing and John Williams’ unforgettable score.

A summer release for a film set at the beach turned out to be a masterstroke. It was “when school students and college students had time on their hands,” says Jenny Key, Senior Exhibition Curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. An eager audience looking for entertainment meant the summer blockbuster had arrived.

Star Wars: A New Hope

Two summers after Jaws, in 1977, Star Wars changed the landscape again. “That’s when [the movie studios] said, ‘Right, this really is a new model,’” says Tim Robey, film critic and author of Box Office Poison. “‘We want films with heroes and villains and we want to release them in summer… We’re going to build brands with these filmmakers now.’”

George Lucas’s first Star Wars movie established the blueprint for what we now think of as the classic summer blockbuster, with big effects and lots of potential for sequels. Plus, of course, tonnes of merchandise. Star Wars wasn’t just a movie, it was an event. And that’s what the blockbusters were aiming for from that point onwards.

E.T.

Spielberg landed another perfect blockbuster in 1981, with Raiders of the Lost Ark. But in the following year, he showed a blockbuster doesn’t need to be action-packed. E.T. is a heartwarming story of a boy befriending an alien. It doesn’t have the thrills of Jaws or Star Wars, but it has immense heart and a huge sense of wonder.

It’s a story that appeals to every age – essential for a summer blockbuster. It’s also timeless, which explains why it’s now made almost $800 million at the box office.

Steven Spielberg shares the soundtrack of his life on Desert Island Discs

The Lion King

Disney animation was always popular – adjusted for inflation, the 1937 Snow White has earned more than $1 billion in ticket sales – but in 1992 The Lion King was a very different beast.

Disney’s other big late 80s/early 90s films – The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin – released around Christmas, to capture the holiday market. The Lion King pitched itself against that summer’s big action movies, like True Lies and Speed, and beat them all, becoming the highest earning film of the year. Now we see an animated smash almost every summer.

Jurassic Park

Steven Spielberg again. The man is just very good at making huge movies. Tim Robey says Spielberg “likes a premise to be something you can hold in the palm of your hand…” Jurassic Park essentially asks the question ‘What if dinosaurs were resurrected today?’

It’s a concept everyone can immediately understand and buy into. With photo-real digital dinosaurs – something audiences had never seen before – and peerless action, Jurassic Park is just about the perfect blockbuster.

Independence Day

The thing about a summer blockbuster is it doesn’t necessarily have to be good to be a hit. Roland Emmerich’s 1996 sci-fi actioner Independence Day is cheesy and silly, but good lord it’s fun to watch.

“My pet theory about summer blockbusters is that the best ones are an expression of our collective death drive,” says Ellen. Independence Day is the story of aliens coming to Earth with the express intention of killing us all, and humanity trying to fight back. It’s all played out on a ludicrous scale, and shouldn’t popcorn movies be ludicrous to a certain degree?

Avengers: Endgame

From 2008’s Iron Man, the Marvel movies became the biggest game in town for over a decade. The series peaked in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame, a mash-up of just about every superhero in the franchise and a demonstration of just how much spectacle a massive budget can buy (it reportedly cost around $400 million).

“You can’t deny how radically [Marvel] changed what we see as a blockbuster,” says pop culture critic Kayleigh Donaldson. “The way it’s released. How it’s styled.” Avengers: Endgame is, in a sense, the ultimate precision engineered blockbuster. When executives were dreaming of summer megahits in the 1970s, this is probably what they imagined.

Radio 1's Ali Plumb meets the cast of Avengers: Endgame

Barbie/Oppenheimer

There’s some friendly disagreement about whether Barbenheimer, 2023’s unofficial double bill of Barbie and Oppenheimer, meets the summer blockbuster definition.

Both did huge box office ($1.5 billion and $947 respectively). “Oppenheimer, no matter which way you cut it, is not a summer blockbuster,” says Mark, but Ellen sees it differently. She says the pairing was a cultural event and that Oppenheimer does fit the summer blockbuster mould because “it’s about the end of the world.”

The cast of Barbie talks movies with Radio 1's Ali Plumb

The two movies may have little in common – one a story about a doll discovering her humanity and the other about a scientist who fears he’s lost his by inventing the atomic bomb – but they created excitement and put bums on seats. And isn’t that the essence of a summer blockbuster?

You can hear more from Mark and Ellen's adventures in the world of summer blockbusters by listening to the episode in full.