The Best Summer Movies of 2024

I forget who said it first (maybe it was Thomas Edison?) but it really is true: We come to the movies for magic. We need that, all of us, that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim and we go somewhere we’ve never been before.

For those of us who go to the movies not just to be entertained, but somehow reborn (together), it was a surprisingly good summer at the movies — especially after last summer, which despite Barbenheimermania still included disappointments like Elemental and Gran Turismo, plus outright clunkers like Meg 2: The Trench, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and the Little Mermaid remake — along with multiple Hollywood strikes that stopped film productions in their tracks.

Not every single one of this year’s summer’s stories felt perfect and powerful. Maybe the highs in movie theaters weren’t always that high. But the lows were rarely very low either, and almost all of the major tentpoles delivered what customers paid for: Thrills, action, romance, and countless explosions.

For sake of fairness, I only ranked wide releases, along with productions that were released in movie theaters. (Otherwise Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F probably could have snuck in there towards the bottom of this list.) After a slow start to 2024, and doom-and-gloom predictions that warned last year’s strikes had worsened the already precipitous declines in theater attendance, the summer reminded us: Heartache still feels good in a place like this.

READ MORE: The Best Movies of the Decade