The Gross: The Hits, the Flops - The Summer That Ate Hollywood

Overview
Peter Bart chronicles a pivotal era in Hollywood when the summer season became the testing ground for big bets, bold marketing and public spectacle. The narrative follows the collisions between commerce and creativity as studios launched a parade of high-stakes releases, each promising outsized returns while exposing the fragility of star-driven and effects-heavy filmmaking. The account blends box-office analysis with vivid reporting on the personalities who made, and sometimes sank, those films.

Insider perspective
Bart writes from long experience as a studio watcher and trade insider, drawing on conversations with executives, producers, agents and stars. That vantage gives access to boardroom strategies, marketing memos, test-screening reactions and the kinds of private alliances and rivalries that rarely reach the public eye. The voice is both knowledgeable and conversational, pairing industry jargon with anecdotal color.

Case studies and personalities
The book structures the season as a series of set pieces: launches that became triumphs and others that spectacularly misfired. Bart spotlights the executives who green-lit projects, the producers who shepherded them through chaos, and the stars whose cachet could make or break a release. These profiles illustrate how decisions made far from the camera, casting calls, budget contingencies, advertising buys, shaped the fate of films and the careers of those who backed them.

Box-office mechanics
A recurring theme is the changing arithmetic of success. Bart explains the mechanics behind opening-weekend obsession, the rise of sophisticated tracking and the pressure to monetize overseas markets, merchandising and ancillary outlets. The analysis emphasizes how a few million dollars in marketing or a shift in release date could alter a studio's quarterly fortunes, and how that pressure encouraged risk-taking as well as short-term thinking.

Industry trends
The narrative captures broader structural shifts: consolidation, the increasing influence of corporate owners, the growing budgets of tentpole pictures and the parallel rise of independent cinema and specialty divisions. Bart explores how technological shifts, audience fragmentation and global distribution reshaped decision-making, while also noting how old-school dealmaking and personal relationships continued to steer outcomes.

Tone and critique
Bart balances admiration for showmanship with skepticism about excess. He admires the scale and ambition of big-picture enterprises while criticizing the greed, hubris and managerial myopia that often accompany them. The tone alternates between wry observation and trenchant criticism, offering sympathy for those who try to make art under enormous financial constraints and impatience with executives who treat films solely as quarterly metrics.

Why it matters
The account serves as both chronicle and cautionary tale about the modern film business: how heat, hype and human error combine to create cultural phenomena and spectacular failures. It is aimed at readers who want to understand how Hollywood's business decisions ripple into the marketplace and the press, and at anyone curious about the personalities and practices behind the movies that dominated the cultural conversation. The result is a readable, informed portrait of an industry at a crossroads, where talent, money and timing decide fate on a summer weekend.