The Beasts Of Summer
It seems audiences long to see animals brought to life on the big screen
The animals rose and reigned in the summer of 2016.
Movies exist to provide us what we lack in our everyday lives.
Bored office drones love the action and adventure in Bond, Bourne and The Fast And The Furious.
Women with dorky husbands long for the romance of Twilight.
Powerless kids get off on the power of superheroes.
But perhaps the one thing that we all hunger for in our increasingly urbanised world is nature.
As paradise becomes paved with parking lots, it looms ever larger in our imagination.
I think this is the reason that flicks full of fauna have dominated the box office in the past few months.
The top-grossing movie was, of course Captain America: Civil War, which featured a Spider-Man, an Ant-Man, a Black Panther (above) and a Falcon.
It took in over a billion dollars at the global box office.
Zootopia should be up here too, except that it was released in March.
ADVENTURES
The second biggest summer film was The Jungle Book, and the third was Finding Dory.
The former, based on Rudyard Kipling's classic novel, is about a boy's adventures in a jungle populated with talking bears, panthers, wolves, snakes, orangutans and one terrible, terrible tiger.
The latter is, of course Pixar's sequel to Finding Nemo, and it tells the tale of a forgetful blue tang looking for her family.
Then we come to The Secret Life Of Pets, which turned out to be a surprising success, bringing in well over half a billion worldwide.
And let's not forget The Angry Birds Movie, The Legend Of Tarzan, Ice Age: Collision Course and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows.
Now we're ending the summer with The Shallows, in which a bikini-clad Blake Lively battles a shark.
I don't know how someone could look at all this and not think that something strange is going on.
The summer of 2016 is red in tooth and claw.
Surely something in our souls is longing for the wild.
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