The #1 Movie in July 2016 — and Everything Else We Were Watching, Ten Years Later
The Secret Life of Pets was the #1 movie in July 2016, opening to roughly $104 million and dethroning Finding Dory, which had held the top spot for the three weeks before it. On television, Stranger Things premiered on Netflix on July 15, and The Night Of premiered on HBO five days earlier, on July 10. All of it is a decade old this month.
July 2016 was the last truly pre-streaming-wars summer: Netflix was still mostly an upstart, "content" wasn't yet an arms race, and a movie's fate was decided almost entirely by a Friday-to-Sunday number in the trades. It was also, weirdly, an election-year summer that knew it — a horror franchise literally called itself The Purge: Election Year and opened over the July 4th weekend. Ten years on, Stranger Things turns 10 this month, which is the kind of sentence that makes you feel every one of those years at once.
Where can you stream The Secret Life of Pets now?
Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney · Louis C.K., Kevin Hart, Jenny Slate, Ellie Kemper
Opened July 8 to about $104 million — the biggest launch ever for an original animated film — and grossed over $875 million worldwide on a $75 million budget.
The story of what your dog and cat really get up to while you're at work, from Illumination. Proof that summer 2016 audiences would still show up for something that wasn't a sequel.
Where can you stream Ghostbusters (2016) now?
Paul Feig · Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones
Opened July 15 to a solid-not-spectacular $46 million weekend, finishing second to Pets.
The all-female reboot opened into a genuine culture war over its trailer, then became a flashpoint for online harassment aimed at its cast — especially Leslie Jones — well before "review-bombing" was a household term. A decade on, the noise has mostly faded and the film gets reassessed more on its own comedic terms.
Where can you stream Stranger Things now?
The Duffer Brothers · Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown
Dropped all eight episodes of Season 1 on July 15, 2016, with almost no advance marketing.
Netflix's Spielberg-and-Stephen-King homage turned into the platform's first true word-of-mouth phenomenon — the show that made "Netflix Original" mean something beyond a marketing label. It turns ten this month.
Where can you stream The Night Of now?
Steven Zaillian · Riz Ahmed, John Turturro
HBO's eight-episode limited series premiered July 10, 2016.
Riz Ahmed plays a young man swept into New York's criminal justice system after a chance encounter turns into a murder investigation, with John Turturro as the low-rent lawyer who takes his case. One of the most critically acclaimed dramas of the year, and it helped cement the modern "true-crime-adjacent prestige miniseries" as its own genre.
The Legend of Tarzan
Opening July 1 alongside The Purge: Election Year and The BFG, David Yates's $180 million Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation — Alexander Skarsgård, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson — beat lowered expectations with a $38.5 million debut but never really escaped "expensive misfire" status.
Not on a subscription service right now — rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, or Google Play.
The Purge: Election Year
The third entry in Blumhouse's ultra-cheap dystopian franchise leaned all the way into its title, imagining a presidential candidate running on a platform of ending the annual Purge, and out-earned both Tarzan and The BFG on opening weekend with $31.4 million against a $10 million budget.
Not on a subscription service right now — rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, or Google Play.
Star Trek Beyond
The third Kelvin-timeline entry, directed by Justin Lin and dedicated to the memory of Anton Yelchin and Leonard Nimoy, opened July 22 to $59.6 million before Comic-Con buzz gave way fast to the next week's competition.
Currently on Paramount+.
Jason Bourne
Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass reunited for the first time since 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum, opening July 29 to $60 million — the franchise's second-best debut ever — before getting flattened the following weekend by Suicide Squad.
Not on a subscription service right now — rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, or Google Play.
Bad Moms
STX's raunchy comedy, starring Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, and Kathryn Hahn, opened the same July 29 weekend to $23.4 million on just a $20 million budget and quietly became one of the summer's best-performing counterprogramming hits.
Currently streaming on Hulu.
Nerve
Emma Roberts and Dave Franco starred in this social-media-dare thriller that opened Wednesday, July 27 — its premise (a truth-or-dare app that escalates into real danger) has aged into something closer to prophecy about online life.
Not on Netflix anymore — rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, or Google Play.
- Pokémon Go launched in the US on July 6, sending people wandering through parks and parking lots looking at their phones — a genuine, brief moment of shared cultural mania.
- Twenty One Pilots' "Heathens" — the lead single for Suicide Squad — hit radio that July, a song from a movie about to flatten Jason Bourne at the box office the very next weekend.
Ten years ago, nearly everything above was reachable in exactly one place: a movie theater, or, for the two shows, a single premium cable subscription and a still-new Netflix account. Today the same slate is scattered across Netflix, Max, Paramount+, Hulu, and a handful of rental storefronts — which is a pretty tidy illustration of what happened to the entertainment landscape in the space of a decade, and exactly the kind of sprawl Tralr's monthly lineup verdicts are built to sort through.