Word: summered
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...Hollywood, 2008 was a very good summer for men who fly, women who bond and pandas who roundhouse kick. And it wasn't a bad summer for the overall domestic box office, which will total roughly the same as last year - about $4 billion - with higher ticket prices balancing a slight drop in attendance. For a season that lacked the bait of 2007's array of sequels, it's a decent enough haul. But one brooding hero is carrying a disproportionate burden on his muscular shoulders...
...million. Director Christopher Nolan's bleak reinvention of the classic comic book character was savvily marketed and aggressively distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures (TIME and Warner Bros. are both subsidiaries of Time Warner) and warmly welcomed by critics, sparking a box office phenomenon with which no other hero of summer could compete. "Nobody saw Batman coming," says David Poland, editor of Movie City News. "The thing we learned from this summer was we don't know a thing...
...second tier of summer's heroes included some surprises, too. Iron Man, a new franchise built around a lesser-known Marvel Comics character and a lead actor, Robert Downey Jr., whose indie-heavy resume didn't suggest he'd lure the masses, managed to take in $317.5 million. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the film most prognosticators expected to whip into first place, came in third with a respectable though not earth-shattering $315 million. Another summer sure thing - Will Smith in the superhero movie Hancock - made $226 million, a hit by most actors' standards...
...Studios found success with underserved groups this summer. Women's buddy movies Sex and the City ($152 million) and Mamma Mia! ($126 million) and the romantic comedy What Happens in Vegas ($80 million) were, if not home runs, all solid doubles built on female audiences apparently dying to leave the house. "The lesson was you don't need guys to make money on a movie," says Steve Mason, box-office analyst at FantasyMoguls.com. "You can make movies that are a little nichier and still do remarkably well." Animated films Wall-E ($216 million) and Kung Fu Panda ($212 million), meanwhile...
...Virtually absent from the summer box office, however, was product for art houses. Only The Visitor, a well-reviewed drama that hit theaters in April and stayed all summer, and Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona managed to get any traction, each earning more than $9 million to date...