This weekend’s $8.7 million opening for Lionsgate’s “Saw” spinoff “Spiral” was decent given the still-recovering state of movie theaters in North America, but it shows that this summer’s box office is stuck in a time warp.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Memorial Day weekend was the traditional start of the summer blockbuster season — but that began to change around the turn of the 21st century as hits like 1999’s “Star Wars: Episode I,” 2001’s “Shrek”2002’s “Spider-Man” began to show the potential profit of releasing films earlier in May.
Since then, particularly in the 2010s, we’ve seen the summer box office kick off with an explosive start in the first weekend of May — and sometimes even late April, thanks to Marvel hits like “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019 — providing theaters with box office support as smaller films come out in the tentpole’s shadow.