Before Labor Day sunsets brought the season to an end, Hollywood onlookers deemed summer 2014 a colossal failure. Number-crunching put the four-month stretch as the worst box office haul since 2006. Adjusted for inflation, the story looked even more depressing – the worst since 1997, a time when Will Smith dominated Fourth of July weekends. Final counts brought the 1 May and 29 August total to $4.05bn, a 14.7% drop from 2013.

There’s no question: from up high, the numbers look bad. But movie industry soothsayers grabbing the nearest “End is Nigh!” sign may be too quick to the draw. Dire box office narratives embrace iffy comparison points. Not all summers are created equal. Nor should they be.

For an industry settled on a continuously shifting bedrock, Hollywood and its critics only look backward. If the next year doesn’t top the last year, it’s a disaster. But making box office history is like farming: At some point, the studios have to plant more seeds and spread to new fields. Summer 2014 isn’t a failure, it’s the beginning of a new cycle – one that may not even have a “summer season”.

Summer 2013’s $4.8bn return could be seen from space, supplemented by major sequels (Iron Man 3, Despicable Me 2, Fast & the Furious 6, Monsters University) and star-studded blockbusters (World War Z, The Great Gatsby, The Heat). 2013 saw a $500m jump from 2012, a season offering its own “sure thing” twofer: The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. This past year didn’t have a Batman, an Iron Man or a Pixar picture. No one would look at the lineup expecting 2013 business.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest World War Z, starring Brad Pitt, was just one of the star-studded blockbusters responsible for 2013’s epic box office gains. Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT PICTURES/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Alarms sounded when none of summer’s offerings blew past $300m, the golden threshold for modern blockbusters. It’s a self-imposed standard that drowns individual success stories. This year was about bouncing back, tinkering and testing theories. It worked. Legendary Pictures took Godzilla, a fizzled out brand, and turned it into over-performing behemoth, stomping all the way to $200m total.

After its prequel franchise X-Men: First Class bowed to decent returns in 2011 ($146m total), 21st Century Fox found a creative way to integrate its original trilogy cast and reignite the comic book franchise. Same for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which added over $100m to its first installment’s total. Angelina Jolie carried Disney’s untested villainous Maleficent beyond any imaginable expectations. Even Marvel had a surprise: Guardians of the Galaxy was the company’s big risk, a space opera sans traditional (and easily marketable) superheroes. The “risk” currently sits at $280.5m, making it the highest grossing movie of the year. When the inevitable Part II and Part III flood in, then Hollywood can expect a year like 2013.

Andy Serkis as Caesar in a scene from the film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Photograph: AP

It helps that what was passing for mega-blockbusters were really dramatically fulfilling stories, with audiences and critics both on board. Sift through Rotten Tomatoes’ 2013 summer movie scorecard, a list ranking the season’s movies by critical acclaim, and the first blockbuster pops up in spot eight: Stark Trek Into Darkness. Iron Man 3 sits at number 13. Monsters University just below it. 2014 has plenty to tout: Guardians of the Galaxy (#3), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (#4), X-Men: Days of Future Past (#5), Edge of Tomorrow (#7), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (#10). If audiences weren’t flocking to theaters, it wasn’t because of the output quality.

Summer 2014 failed by archaic standards, where male-centric explosion spectacles have to set new records as they come and go each weekend. It’s a bigger-is-better mentality shattered by movies produced for less than $100m (or, hell, $50, $20, or $10m). Anyone tuned into the young adult phenomenon knew A Fault in Our Stars was poised to be a hit, but sweeping the $124m success under the rug is tunnel vision. Likewise for Lucy, Scarlett Johansson and writer-director Luc Besson’s alternative to the bro-heavy comic book movies that trounced Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Hercules.

There was room for indie to thrive, too; IFC’s Boyhood and Weinstein Company Korean-English sci-fi movie Snowpiercer are burning at the box office, the latter earning nearly half its box office from VOD sales. The summer raised questions about who watches movies and how they watch them. It was a necessary testing ground.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lucy starred Scarlett Johansson and was steadily successful this summer. Photograph: Universal

Small creative investments paid off big for studios. Actor-producer Seth Rogen, whose Neighbors took in $150m, wound up a smarter gamble than 2013’s creatively drained The Hangover Part III, which petered out just above $112m (in stark contrast to the first instalment’s $277m). And while Melissa McCarthy’s Tammy didn’t impress critics, her attempt at something new hooked audiences over the competitive July 4 weekend. The comedienne’s small-scale passion project took in $83.4m

Honing in summer sales is, itself, a notion of the past. It’s one patch of land on a hundred acre property. Hollywood’s Old McDonalds are already thinking beyond the season. Marvel released its event money-printing machine, Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($259.8m), in April. The Lego Movie turned February into a viable hotspot with a $257.8m gross. Kevin Hart killed it in January (Ride Along, $134.2m) and did decent business during the summertime (Think Like a Man Too, $65.1m). 2014’s horizon promises to up the year’s end totals: Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb and the inevitable Oscar-bait breakouts.

Box office plummeting isn’t a signal of apocalypse, it’s a sign the industry needs a new set of graphs. As the movie industry game evolves, so should the definition of success or failure. Summer 2014 was a success-filled season, dampened by folks impatiently waiting for Avengers 2 to blow the roof of the multiplex.

Box office statistics sourced from BoxOfficeMojo.com.

