Sequel Overload Leads Weak Summer Box Office

The summer movie season has not been filled with good news for studios so far. Depending on which numbers you look at, ticket sales for the beginning of the summer are down somewhere between 15 and 25 percent compared to the same period last year. At this time last year, Jurassic World was roaring its way to the biggest opening weekend of all time, but this year, no big-budget summer release has managed to break through to blockbuster success.

The most obvious scapegoat among 2016's box-office woes is a lack of originality. Of the top 10 movies of the year so far,seven have been sequels or reboots. That number rises to eight if you consider Deadpool to be part of the X-Men franchise, leaving Zootopia and The Angry Birds Movie as the only original subjects in the top 10. If you expand the focus to the top 20, you'll find an astounding 15 sequels, meaning that nearly 80 percent of Hollywood's biggest movies are offering audiences something they've seen before.

That wouldn't be so bad, maybe, if audiences were clamoring for sequels, but most of 2016's sequels have failed to live up to the success of their predecessors, some of them spectacularly so. Even The Conjuring 2, which won last week's box-office race with a relatively strong showing, fell short of the original film's performance, and sequels such as Alice Through the Looking Glass and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising have been major disappointments.

In coming weeks, sequels and reboots will continue to be the main course on the box-office menu, with Independence Day: Resurgence, The Purge: Election Year, Ghostbusters, Star Trek Beyond and more taking up theater space. Whether or not any of these retreads can find break-out success remains to be seen.