For many of us millennials, we remember the upside-down kiss from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. It was important. It was alluring. It was early May 2002. The brand-new beginning of summer for Hollywood. Film critic Kirk Honeycutt spelled it out in his Hollywood Reporter review at the time: “Spider-Man is the first clear hit film of the summer, so long as you don’t mind summer starting May 3.” In fact, it was such a success that at least one big studio blockbuster would open at the start of May after that without fail (Marvel very nearly owned the slot for over a decade).
Up until the late 1990s, this position had been saved for smaller genre pictures like Breakdown in 1997 or Black Dog the year after (both underrated action thrillers, by the way). In early May 1999 and 2000, however, Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy and then Ridley Scott’s Gladiator became semi-surprise hits that hinted at the possibility of summer expansion. 2001’s The Mummy Returns proved it wasn’t a fad. Spider-Man made it official.
What hasn’t changed is the end of August. The late hours of the solstice, wherein studios often dump the pictures they don’t believe in. This was true well before 2002. Misbegotten, abandoned blockbusters like Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, which escaped into theaters on August 21st, 1992. Or how about 1997’s Kull the Conqueror? Produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis and led by television star Kevin Sorbo, the big-budget fantasy epic was seemingly designed to be dumped in theaters only to recoup its money on the ancillary market. And yet, every once in a while, there is a diamond buried in the doldrums of late summer. Here we list twenty widely released films that came out at the end of August and are better than their release date would suggest.
