From Graveyard to Traffic Jam: The Strange Evolution of the Summer Movie
Originally published on Flavorwire, 6/1/16 . The story goes that the suits at 20th Century Fox were so certain George Lucas’s Star Wars was going to flop (since, the marketing department insisted, the two words of its title were certain death at the box office), they gave it what Alan Ladd Jr., the film’s sole booster among the Fox brass, dubbed “the dead date, the deadest date in the history of movies.” That date was May 25 – Memorial Day weekend. Yes, once upon a time, nobody wanted to open their movie on Memorial Day; what’s more, they didn’t much care to put their movie into the summer season it kicked off. What changed? In a word: Jaws . Before the release of Steven Spielberg’s gigantic smash on June 20, 1975, the summer was, according to author (and the provider of that Star Wars anecdote) Tom Shone, “pretty much the graveyard shift for the movie theaters. You would get a lot of exploitation, the really cheap end of the stick, there was no prestige to it whatsoever. It was c