Why the summer blockbuster will always be cooler than your average movie...

There exists a direct, 101-year-old correlation between the tradition of the summer blockbuster movie and air conditioning technology – if the two hadn’t collided, Hollywood’s July-August season would be a hot, empty mess and ambient temperatures would make a visit to the cinema feel like two hours in a sauna.

Reel back to 1925, and New York industrialist Willis Carrier had a plan to counter the deleterious effect of high summer on moviegoing, installing a newfangled ‘refrigerating plant’ powering a ‘centrifugal chiller’ in Times Square’s Rivoli Theatre. Carrier had invented the cooling machine in 1902, forming the Carrier Air Conditioner Company of America in 1908. ‘We have invested over $100,000 ($1.8 million in today’s money) in a refrigeration plant to keep you cool and comfortable when the world is sweltering,’ announced the Rivoli’s proud management on its Memorial Day debut. By 1930, more than 300 US picture houses could advertise their buildings as ‘cooled by refrigeration’, offering a respite from stifling conditions outside. Better still, the air conditioning helped keep hot projection equipment from overheating also.

A decade later, the proliferation of holiday air-con begat a new genre for what had traditionally been the slow season for the movie industry: the summer ‘blockbuster’ was named after a particularly lethal brand of World War II bomb capable of taking out a whole block when dropped from aircraft. Hollywood first borrowed the term to describe the 1943 war drama Bombardier. ‘The block-buster of all action-thrill service shows!’ screamed the ads.

In 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws became the first bona fide summer blockbuster of the modern era, with punters literally queuing around the block to see the sun, sea and shark spectacle (sometimes two or three times in a single day) and the film busting all records by becoming the first to take $100 million at the box office (adjusting for inflation, that’s around $584 million today).

Over five decades on, many of the original summer blockbusters – Alien, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Batman, Jurassic Park, Star Wars – continue to thrive as highly profitable movie franchises, and continue to owe part of their success to aircon. How cool is that?