Late Summer 

• Universal Pictures

For decades, the first full weekend of May has marked an unofficial start to the summer movie season. That was supposed to be true in 2020 as well, with a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie—the stand-alone spin-off Black Widow—kicking things off as Marvel movies have for most of the previous dozen years. But then that release didn't happen, and a year that would become defined as much by what didn't happen as by what did happen came into even sharper focus.

Most movie theaters are open now—the ones that weren't forced to close permanently in the wake of the pandemic, anyway—and the vaccine roll-out has made theatrical movie-going a considerably less threatening proposition than it was a year ago at this time. The backlog of summer-movie-esque fare has already started rolling into theaters with the successful openings of Godzilla vs. Kong and Mortal Kombat, and the prospect of the latest Fast & Furious movie finally appearing in June has inspired a two-month-long special re-release of all eight previous franchise installments. Even Black Widow is back on the schedule for early July. It's 2021, and summer movie season is back, baby!

Well, sort of. As it stands right now, the schedule is mostly a trickle of titles, some of them backlogged from last year. Both Warner Bros. and Disney have taken advantage of their streaming platforms—HBO Max and Disney+, respectively—to provide same-day home-viewing options for some of the higher-profile releases, including Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Suicide Squad, Cruella and, yes, Black Widow. As much as the solid numbers for Godzilla vs. Kong show that people are ready to go back to theaters to see popcorn entertainment, it's not clear if there are still a lot of people who will decide they're just fine with having that popcorn fresh out of the microwave bag on their own living room couch.

I wrote just recently about what I miss about theatrical moviegoing, and also weighed in 15 years ago about the unique place summer movies hold in creating new generations of movie lovers. I won't recap that previous argument in its entirety, but in summary, it's important to keep in mind that even those who eventually become lovers of more challenging and complicated movies generally start out by falling in love with stuff like Star Wars, James Bond and superheroes, not with documentaries and subtitled dramas. They're the "learn to crawl before you learn to run" of aesthetic appreciation. And while it's certainly true that not everyone who learns to run eventually learns to run a marathon—and not everyone who starts out loving big dumb movies graduates beyond loving anything but big dumb movies—no one who has ever run a marathon didn't start out by crawling.

There's reason to push back against how much conversational oxygen gets sucked up by comic-book movies and other simple spectacles, and it's understandable if frustration over their omnipresence bubbles over into just wanting the whole lot of them to go away. There is, however, a middle ground between a moviegoing world of nothing but summer movies, and a moviegoing world without summer movies. The bursts of endorphine bliss provided by crowd-pleasers keep people coming back to the movies, at a time when the economics of the industry are very much in a state of flux. Also, and not for nothing at this point in human history, but we should accept our bursts of endorphine bliss where we can find them.

The past year has been such a disruptive force on so many levels, including the almost incomprehensible loss of life, that spending too much time angsting over when we'll see Vin Diesel drive a car off a cliff feels, well ... a bit improper. But as we all spent months stuck in our homes, we also spent hours with our streaming services, enjoying the comfort food of our favorite movies. We want those movies, and more like them, to be around the next time we really need them. So while summer movie season might not be starting this year at the time we'd usually see it, at least it's starting. And I hope it once again provides the fuel for a bunch more movie love in generations to come.