What will be the blockbuster movies of Summer 2024? Entertainment Weekly published a list at the beginning of May, which was helpful provided you eliminate mere summer releases (I Saw the TV Glow, Babes, Firebrand, Inside Out 2, The Watchers, Janet Planet, Despicable Me 4, The Instigators, Kinds of Kindness, Fly Me to the Moon, It Ends With Us, The Bikeriders, Blink Twice, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) and everything being released on streaming (Atlas, Hit Man, Ultraman: Rising, Trigger Warning, The Union, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, The Instigators, Jackpot, Appollo 13: Survival).

Which leaves a much smaller group of big budget action films and spectacles (almost totally free of MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe] content, it must be noted) aiming to entice us into theatres and make the top of Variety's box office charts: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Bad Boys 4: Ride or Die, Kevin Costner's two-part western Horizon, MaXXXine, Transformers: High Moon, Twisters, Deadpool & Wolverine, Alien: Romulus and The Crow. A lot of remakes, reboots and sequels, very few original ideas, and every one of them arriving with big production and marketing budgets that need to be made back.

I can only speak for myself, but who cares? Every summer arrives with at least a half dozen hopeful blockbusters grasping for our dollars, like beggars in designer clothes. And I'm old enough to remember before films presented themselves with such audacity; a time when movie studios assumed that we preferred to spend our summers on vacation, at the cottage or the beach, when the weeks before and after Christmas were when you booked big budget productions in every movie palace and neighbourhood theatre that would show them.

It was a long time ago, and it all ended with a movie about a fish.