Summer blockbuster season is over, how'd we do?

(As always, potential spoilers just in case.)

My favorite movie related website, is rotten tomatoes. They take every review and balance it out a final score out of 100 on their website. Every year, after summer blockbuster season, they list all the films (Wide release and select limited) released during that period in order of score. So I figure why not look it over and see how we did.

The list can be found here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/guides/summer-movie-scorecard-2014/

Now, first of, out of 53 movies on the list, only 23 of them have a score of 60% or over which the site considers a good film. That's about 43% good films. Now how does that compare to let's say, 2013?

2013 had 57 films released during the summer. 32 of them were 60% and over, which comes out to about 56%. So a thirteen percent drop in quality. 

However, both were better than 2012 (The year the Avengers, Dark Knight Rises, and Moonlight Kingdom came out) which had 17 films out of 44, which is about 39%

But 2012 had the lowest number of summer films, so what does that mean? In theory it would say that the good films were that much better. And looking at the list, the scores for the good films jump drastically, usually between 3 - 8% difference.

2013, the biggest percentage change from film to film (for the ones 60% and over) was 5%. Which basically means that the good films weren't too distinctive quality wise. Basically they were good movies, but on a scaled difference, they were of very similar quality. Now obviously you can tell the difference between a film at 60% and one at 90%, but what I'm saying is you would only notice the drastic differences more.

Now, 2014, also had the biggest percentage difference be only 5%, but then why are there fewer good movies over all?

Let's look at the films on the border of good and bad for 2014.

Good: Hercules 61%

Bad: The Purge: Anarchy 57%

A four percent difference. Now, what happens if we look at the next three worse films after that?

The Amazing Spiderman 2: 53%

Jersey Boys: 53%

Maleficent: 48%

Another 4% drop, then nothing, then a 5% drop. Interesting. So what this basically means is that the bad films, were more distinctively bad. Sure there are plenty of 1% differences, but the biggest percentage difference for the bad films was 8%. The same amount as the best films of 2012.

So what does all this tell us? Basically, the bad films of 2014 were really bad. If the good films of 2012 were good because they were distinctively good, then the bad films of 2014 were distinctively bad.

Three examples from lower on the list

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For: 45%

Tammy: 24%

Blended: 14%

But what about the good films?

We had a pretty good mix of good films for 2014. Big dramas, Comic Book Films, Science Fiction, Comedies, so much stuff. This was the year we got 22 jump street, Godzilla, Xmen days of future past, Boyhood, Guardians of the galaxy. Hell some of the films from this year might even make my personal top 10 (that's a list and a long internal debate for another day.)

For reference, the top three films and their scores according to rotten tomatoes

3. Guardians of The Galaxy: 92%

2. Snowpiercer: 95%

1. Boyhood: 99%

So as for the year over all? Sure the bad movies might be bad, even really bad. But the good films were just that much better. So even though i'd argue the summer sort of just trickled off, I say we did alright overall.

I'm not sure how the rest of the year will go (no really big releases for at least two to three weeks) so it's too early to judge the whole year. But if we were to judge the year by the summer alone, like I said, we did alright. So many of these films will be in my dvd collection when they come out.

So there we go, an alright summer. Sorry if this is a bit more nerd number crunching than usual, also I'm bad at math so most of this might be gibberish. But that's my thinking, we do okay.

So until next time, I'll see you folks at the movies. (I swear I've heard someone else say that.)