25 Years of July Fourth Box Office Winners, Ranked
Had the coronavirus pandemic not wiped out summer moviegoing in 2020, this July Fourth holiday weekend would have seen the release of Minions: The Rise of Gru—the latest entry in the Despicable Me franchise and its spinoffs—as well as Free Guy, a video game action-comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer. (Maybe next year.) Instead, there are no new major movies at all—beyond the filmed version of Hamilton now streaming on Disney+. So, to fill the void left by closed theaters on what is normally a high-traffic weekend at the cinema, Vanity Fair has ranked every box office Independence Day weekend champion since 1995 from worst to best. Spoiler alert: expect to see lots of explosions, aliens, frantic chase scenes, and several Transformers.
© Paramount/Everett Collection.Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, June 24, 2009. Earned $42.3 million over the July Fourth holiday weekend to bring its domestic total to $293.3 million.
The first Transformers sequel is an offensive disaster, filled with racist stereotypes, female objectification, and pure stupidity. “When I look back at it, that was crap,” Michael Bay himself told Empire in 2011. “The writers’ strike was coming hard and fast. It was just terrible to do a movie where you’ve got to have a story in three weeks.”
From the Everett Collection.Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)
Box Office: Opened on Friday, June 27, 2014. Led the July 4-6 box office weekend with a total of $37 million for a domestic gross to that point of $175.3 million.
Michael Bay has spent the better part of the past 15 years making terrible Transformers movies. But Age of Extinction is particularly objectionable because of a scene in which a 20-year-old male character (played by Jack Reynor) defends his romantic relationship with a 17-year-old girl by explaining Romeo and Juliet laws. “When you look at the culture of it now, especially given the advent of the #MeToo era, yeah, it’s definitely a problematic joke, but I’m not the writer of the film,” Reynor said last year.
From Universal Pictures/Everett Collection.Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Box Office: Opened on Friday, June 22, 2018. Led the box office on July 4, 2018, with $11.5 million, bringing its domestic total to $297.6 million to that point. (With July Fourth falling on a Wednesday, the holiday frame was basically split between the two weekends; Disney released Ant-Man and the Wasp on Friday, July 6, 2018.)
There are some strong atmospheric moments in the back-half of J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World sequel, but this bad movie ends on a confounding note—asking, “What if bringing murderous dinosaurs back from the dead was actually a good idea?”
© Paramount/Everett Collection.Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, and earned $180.6 million through the holiday weekend.
For his sequel to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Michael Bay leaned hard on grotesque 9/11 imagery to add an unearned gravitas to the franchise. Dark of the Moon is notable for its new lead actress, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who stepped in after Megan Fox was fired for comparing Bay’s directing style to Adolf Hitler. (Recently, after Bay was slammed on Twitter for the way he treated Fox when she was younger, the actress released a statement about her former boss.)
© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.Wild Wild West (1999)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, June 30, 1999, and earned $40.9 million through the end of July Fourth weekend.
A reunion between Will Smith and Barry Sonnenfeld after the breakout success of Men in Black felt like a slam dunk proposition. But Wild Wild West was a failure from the jump: an adaptation of a television show few remembered, performed with a complete lack of chemistry between its lead actors (Smith and Kevin Kline).
© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.Superman Returns (2006)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, July 28, 2006, and earned $108 million through the holiday weekend.
Directed by Bryan Singer and starring Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. A hard pass!
From Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy.Cats & Dogs (2001)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, July 4, 2001, and earned $35.7 million through the holiday weekend.
A fun fact: this live-action and animated hybrid about the contentious relationship between the title animals featured the voice of Charlton Heston as a mastiff dog. It was one of his final roles.
From the Everett Collection.Despicable Me 3 (2017)
Box Office: Opened on Friday, June 30, 2017, and earned $99 million through the holiday weekend.
Let’s just go right to the Minions’ Wikipedia entry to find out a little more about the most recognizable part of this blockbuster franchise: “They have one or two eyes, and their irises are almost always brown (except for Bob, who has one green and one brown eye). They have no discernible noses but seem capable of smelling, as they are shown smelling fruit and are affected by the Fart Gun.” Why not?
From Album/Alamy.The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, June 30, 2010, and earned $176.3 million through the holiday weekend.
Remember Twilight? By all accounts, Eclipse was a step forward from the panned The Twilight Saga: New Moon. But this David Slade film pales in comparison to its successor, Bill Condon’s mostly unhinged and off-the-wall two-part Breaking Dawn finale.
© Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Box Office: Opened on Tuesday, July 3, 2012, and earned $137 million through the holiday weekend.
Before Spider-Man was rightfully reconnected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sony tried to restart its crown jewel intellectual property with (500) Days of Summer filmmaker Marc Webb. It almost succeeded, if only because the real-life romance between stars Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone gave the franchise something few superhero movies dare attempt to try: sexual chemistry.
© Walt Disney/Everett Collection.Finding Dory (2016)
Box Office: Opened on Friday, June 19, 2016. Led the July 4 holiday weekend with $51.4 million to bring its domestic total to $381.7 million to that point.
As with most late-stage Pixar sequels, Finding Dory does not need to exist. But it’s hard to knock this movie, which goes down smoothly even as its plot heads over the falls, almost in a literal sense. (By the end, an octopus is driving a truck, which even for a movie about talking fish feels like a step too far.)
© Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.Men in Black II (2002)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, July 3, 2002, and earned $87.2 million through the holiday weekend.
Barry Sonnenfeld and Will Smith rebounded from the failure of Wild Wild West to make this perfectly adequate sequel that covered much of the same terrain as the first film. Shot in the weeks leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the ending of Men in Black II was originally supposed to take place at the foot of the Twin Towers. (It was reconceived.)
© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, July 2, 2003, and earned $72.3 million through the holiday weekend.
At the time, 12 years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 3 was considered a misstep in the franchise. But 17 years later, following multiple bad Terminator movies, Rise of the Machines looks pretty special by comparison. The rare blockbuster that was willing to end on a truly down note.
© Sony Pictures/Everett Collection.Hancock (2008)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, July 2, 2008, and earned $103.8 million through the holiday weekend.
The original script for Hancock was one of those legendary ‘90s screenplays that seemed to ping-pong from one major filmmaker to another: the list of directors who were attached at one point or another includes Tony Scott, Michael Mann, and Terminator 3’s Jonathan Mostow. It wound up in the hands of Peter Berg, who took a script he once compared to Leaving Las Vegas and lightened it up. The result just misses greatness. Hancock has a lot of ideas about superheroes and a committed Will Smith in the title role, and it knew Charlize Theron was an action hero long before everyone caught up. But a reimagining of the comic book genre maybe came a decade too soon.
© Warner Bros/Everett Collection.The Perfect Storm (2000)
Box Office: Finished No. 1 over the June 30-July 2 weekend in 2000 with $41.3 million.
Based on the real-life story of the Andrea Gail, a fishing ship that sank in 1991 while caught in a tempest off the coast of Massachusetts, The Perfect Storm is a time capsule to that period when George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg were friends. "I think George has got a thing for me," Wahlberg said in a 2000 interview. "I've definitely got a thing for George, so it works out good."
© Paramount/Everett Collection.Transformers (2007)
Box Office: Opened on Tuesday, July 3, 2007, and earned $155.4 million through the holiday weekend.
The Transformers franchise exemplifies what’s wrong with Hollywood, but it didn’t start out that way. Produced by Steven Spielberg and featuring a legitimate breakout turn from Shia LaBeouf, Michael Bay’s 2007 blockbuster is actually a highly enjoyable summer confection that perfectly marries the warring styles of its chief creative forces.
From the Everett Collection.Independence Day (1996)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, July 3, 1996, and earned $96.1 million through the end of the week.
The movie that launched Will Smith into the stratosphere and a throwback to the Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970s, Independence Day has too many memorable moments to count. But proof of its relevance remains unfortunately ever-present: last month, President Donald Trump retweeted a meme of Bill Pullman’s quotable presidential address. Pullman later denounced Trump.
© Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.Men in Black (1997)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, July 2, 1997, and earned $84.1 million through the holiday weekend.
July 4 belonged to Will Smith in the 1990s. It’s Men in Black that stands as his high-water mark, a film that arguably gave the actor his best onscreen sparring partner in Tommy Lee Jones. Credit for the out-of-the-box pairing goes to director Barry Sonnenfeld’s wife, Susan. “Will Smith is her idea,” Sonnenfeld told Vulture in 2012. “I said to her, ‘Tommy Lee Jones,’ and she said to me, ‘Will Smith.’ And that part wasn’t written for a young black rookie. The studio wanted Chris O’Donnell. And it’s only because of Sweetie that we thought of Will. I had to go to a dinner at The Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles with Chris O’Donnell, who was deciding between Men In Black and another movie. And I told him, ‘Here’s the truth. I’m not a very good director. I really don’t have a clue. I don’t think the script is very good. If I were you, I would take the other movie.’”
© Walt Disney/Everett Collection.Armageddon (1998)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, July 1, 1998 and earned $54.2 million through the end of July 4 weekend.
Roger Ebert famously hated Armageddon. “Here it is, at last, the first 150-minute trailer,” he wrote in a one-star review. But what Ebert and so many other critics despised, audiences loved. Armageddon wasn’t just a summer blockbuster in 1998; it has, improbably, stood the test of time as a movie people watch over and over again. Once, it was even part of the Criterion Collection. Good thing, too, since the DVD commentary on that long out-of-print release includes one of Ben Affleck’s funniest performances. “I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers,” Affleck said during one memorable portion, “and he told me to shut the fuck up.”
© Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, June 30, 2004, and earned $152.4 million through the holiday weekend.
Long considered one of the greatest superhero movies of all time, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man sequel added emotionally complex layers to Peter Parker and his friends long before Christopher Nolan and the Marvel Cinematic Universe upped the expectations for movies about men and women in tights. For all the justified praise given to current web-slinger Tom Holland, there’s something about Tobey Maguire that makes him the perfect friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
From the Everett Collection.Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
Box Office: Opened on Tuesday, July 2, 2019, and earned $185 million through the holiday weekend.
The last July 4 movie released in theaters, at least for another year, Spider-Man: Far From Home is one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s more satisfying entries. Set after the events of Avengers: Endgame, the second Spider-Man film with Tom Holland in the lead role grapples with the consequences of Thanos’s snap and Iron Man’s death, yet is never not funny and crisp. Add a star for Jake Gyllenhaal playing a comic book villain by way of a snotty auteur.
Photo by Frank Masi/Dreamworks/Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock.War of the Worlds (2005)
Box Office: Opened on Wednesday, June 29, 2005, and earned $112.7 million through the holiday weekend.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Steven Spielberg released some of his most challenging and arguably darkest movies: Minority Report, Munich, and War of the Worlds. Perhaps unfairly written off initially as just another Tom Cruise blockbuster, the 2005 science-fiction drama not only captures the terror of 9/11 but now feels almost prescient. At its heart, War of the Worlds is about how society can easily unravel—and how “we’re in this together” can almost immediately devolve into “every person for themselves.”
© Universal/Everett Collection.Apollo 13 (1995)
Box Office: Opened at No. 1 with $38.4 million over the June 30-July 4 long weekend.
Hollywood history would be a lot cleaner had Apollo 13 and Ron Howard triumphed at the Oscars instead of Braveheart and Mel Gibson. A rousing action film masquerading as a historical epic, Howard’s drama is part of star Tom Hanks’s legendary summer run of blockbusters for adults, bookended by Forrest Gump in 1994 and Saving Private Ryan in 1998. That’s fitting for this movie, which blends the tone of both films to great effect and, if nothing else, is responsible for one of the most quoted lines of all-time.
© Walt Disney/Everett Collection.Inside Out (2015)
Box Office: Opened Friday, June 19, 2015. Led the July 3-5 holiday weekend with $29.7 million to bring its domestic total to that point with $245.8 million.
Apologies to the Toy Story franchise, Wall-E, and all the other Pixar movies people love, but at least to this writer’s mind, the landmark Disney animation studio has never released a better film than Inside Out. The story of what happens inside the brain of an 11-year-old girl as her emotions try to save her childhood, Inside Out isn’t just the most emotionally satisfying (and draining) Pixar film: it features some of its best voice work as well. Phyllis Smith, as the downbeat Sadness, is every bit as good as Tom Hanks in Toy Story and Ellen DeGeneres in Finding Nemo, just without the reputation and hype.
