You Won’t Believe the Film That Established May as the Summer Movie Kickoff Month

When Thunderbolts* arrives in theaters on May 2nd, the summer 2025 moviegoing season will officially begin. It’s practically a hollowed tradition at this point that a live-action Marvel Comics movie adaptation kicks off the summer moviegoing season over the first weekend of May. A model of releasing popularized by Spider-Man in 2002, titles like The Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, and Spider-Man 3 (among many others) have ensured that the first weekend of May kicks off with gargantuan box office results that (under the best of circumstances) can reverberate throughout the rest of the season.

It’s tempting to give Spider-Man the credit for starting the trend of May starting summer moviegoing. However, that’s not quite true. Six years before this Sam Raimi directorial effort, another motion picture hit theaters and garnered massive enough box office numbers to forever change when summer moviegoing began.

The Blockbuster That Blew Away Summer Movie Scheduling Norms

For the longest time, Memorial Day weekend was where summer moviegoing started. A release corridor popularized by the original Star Wars trilogy, this holiday frame was the de facto place to kick off the most important season of the year for Hollywood. As late as 1994, the first weekend of May (in this case, May 6-8) housed 3 Ninjas Kick Back, not an Avengers-sized hit. The following summer, the biggest movie to open over the first weekend of May was rom-com French Kiss. It was like the first two frames of May were the swan song for spring moviegoing, not the glorious kick-off to summer movie season.

Still, in the mid-’90s, there were signs of Hollywood hoping to get an extra week or two out of summer moviegoing. Tentpoles Maverick and Die Hard with a Vengeance both opened over the pre-Memorial Day weekend frame. In 1995, Crimson Tide dropped over the May 12-14 frame and became a tidy moneymaker. However, it was in May 1996 when summer movie release norms were forever shattered. This is when Twister opened over the May 10-12 frame and grossed $241.72 million, becoming the second-biggest movie of the season (only Independence Day did better). Turns out, moviegoers would show up in droves for a summer blockbuster released multiple weeks before Memorial Day weekend.

Ironically, this maneuver was done to avoid Twister squaring off against that year’s Memorial Day blockbuster. Originally scheduled for the May 17-19 pre-Memorial Day weekend frame, Warner Bros. and Universal pushed Twister up one week to ensure it didn’t get obliterated by the newest Tom Cruise movie. However, Twister ended up out-grossing the still-lucrative Mission: Impossible by a hefty amount. The David in this May 1996 showdown had become a Goliath. Hollywood would be taking notice. The summer moviegoing season would no longer exclusively kick off over Memorial Day weekend.

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The Immediate Impact of Twister’s Success

In summer 1997, the first weekend of May hosted two movies that cracked the season’s top 15 biggest movies: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and Breakdown. Neither utterly dominated theaters, but they left the likes of earlier first weekend of May releases like 3 Ninjas Kick Back in the dust. The Fifth Element, meanwhile, opened over the second weekend of May where Twister had excelled one year earlier. Early May was officially its own behemoth and not just a preamble to Memorial Day. Deep Impact becoming summer 1998’s third-biggest movie after opening over the second weekend of May would only further solidify the month’s vitality.

An especially important successor to Twister’s revolutionary release date would arrive just at the end of the 20th century. This is when Twister co-distributor Universal Pictures opted to launch The Mummy over the very first weekend of May 1999. This proved an inspired decision that led to The Mummy becoming the sixth-biggest movie of the season. After Twister pushed summer to start earlier and earlier, The Mummy had calcified that first weekend of May as the de facto starting line for summer moviegoing.

By the time Spider-Man became the first movie in history to open to $100+ million over its first three days of release in the first weekend of May 2002, it was difficult to ever imagine a time when the first weekends of May weren’t launching the summer box office. However, these timeframes most certainly weren’t hospitable to new releases for so much of cinema history. Spider-Man and countless other blockbusters never would’ve flourished in this spot on the calendar if it weren’t for Twister storming up new summer moviegoing release date standards in 1996.

Twister is now streaming on Prime Video.