Labor Day weekend and flashes of football on television can mean only one thing: the end of summer.
But before packing away your shorts and sunscreen, let's take a look at how summer movies fared this season. From animated fish to hip futuristic sequels to pirates, movies covered several bases this summer, with a few notable names making the most out of enticing heat-weary crowds into theaters.
Finding Nemo, Pixar's (NASDAQ:PIXR) and Disney's (NYSE:DIS) fishy animated tale, takes the crown this summer with a domestic gross of around $332 million. It recently surpassed Disney's 1994 hit, The Lion King, for U.S. box-office sales. And Nemo's not done yet. The flick still has to swim through all of its global distribution channels, and should also be a blockbuster when it's released on video and DVD.
Disney also had another big winner on its hands this summer with Pirates of the Caribbean, starring the terminally cool Johnny Depp. It's the third-highest grossing movie domestically this summer, pulling in $274 million in just under two months.
The Matrix Reloaded is holding down the No. 2 spot on the list, which has to make Warner Brothers' parent AOL Time Warner (NYSE:AOL) happy. Despite less-than-stellar reviews, Neo and the gang constitute a franchise that works. The movie's made $279 million domestically, plus more cash internationally. The next and final movie in the Matrix series is due out November 5.
Ticket sales for this summer climbed to a record high of $3.27 billion, 2% higher than last summer, with much of that increase driven by ticket price inflation. The number of tickets actually sold was 542.3 million, marking just the fourth-highest in movie history, and down 2% from summer 2002. Still, the summer ended up stronger than many anticipated.
Motley Fool Stock Advisor subscribers have had their eyes trained all along on two of the summer's biggest beneficiaries of movie success: Pixar and AOL Time Warner. David Gardner added both companies to his impressive line-up of market beaters in the past year.
