Report Card: 2010 Summer Box Office

Another summer has flown by, meaning that it's time to review my box office predictions from this past May.

After largely whiffing on the top-grossing movies last year, I'm happy to see that I bounced back pretty well in my guesses this time around. It's surprising that despite the relentless hype and endless promotional tie-ins surrounding Iron Man 2, it actually finished nearly $100 million behind the champ, the unanimously-hailed Toy Story 3. That "twenty-something female" uprising I predicted never materialized, as Sex and the City 2 and Eat, Pray, Love both disappointed. And in perhaps the worst prediction I have ever made, I overestimated the box-office gross of MacGruber by a whopping $111 million. I forgot that there's a reason they make so few Saturday Night Live movies nowadays.

As for my under-estimations, I got blindsided by the success of The Karate Kid (really? People wanted to see Jaden Smith that badly?) and The Expendables (should have seen the potential of an underserved genre). But looking at these box office totals, I was most stunned that The Last Airbender made the top ten. Not only were the reviews atrocious, but the conventional wisdom was that it was the latest addition to M. Night Shyamalan's ongoing career trainwreck. Another lesson learned for next year, when I will once again continue my quest to go 15 for 15.