From Avengers: Infinity War to Solo: A Star Wars Story to the indie smashes of the season, we look at the box office winners and losers of summer 2018.

Last summer, the domestic box office suffered some of its worst returns in years. Major franchise movies like Transformers: The Last Knight and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales under-performed, while big-budget follies like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets cost their respective studios hundreds of millions of dollars. Audiences just didn’t seem too enthused by what was on offer, and so the industry saw new attendance lows. Coming into this summer, many feared a repeat of 2017.

RELATED: Ant-Man & The Wasp Was (Barely) A Box Office Success

Fortunately, this year saw the box office burst back to full health. The season was helped by more unmissable event films than the previous year, with some much-anticipated blockbusters that broke box office records at home and abroad. As the season rolls to a close, we take a look at the biggest hits and disasters of summer 2018.

Winner - Avengers: Infinity War

Doctor Strange traps Thanos in Avengers Infinity War

The definition of a summer movie continues to be stretched. Previously, summer was clearly boxed off as the period between June and August, but now it can stretch as far back as April to include all of Hollywood’s blockbuster plans. Disney and Marvel are largely to blame for this trend, as their indomitable might has reached levels where they can release a film at any point in the year and have it be a smash hit. Case in point: Avengers: Infinity War made a surprise release date move from May to mid-April.

Whatever way you define summer, it’s hard to deny that Infinity War was the clear winner this year. The numbers speak for themselves: $2.045bn worldwide, making it the 4th highest grossing movie of all time, and one of only four movies ever to pass $2bn. It broke pre-sales records and had the second highest ever opening day gross in America. It stayed in the box office top ten for nine weeks, and is still playing in certain theaters.

Marvel has had a strong grasp on the box office all year. Ant Man and The Wasp wasn’t a meteoric hit domestically, but it held on strong and has yet to open in some the international markets. Yet the real sign of their strength lies in a film that came out in February: Black Panther. Ryan Coogler’s film is the second highest grossing film of 2018 behind its Avenging sibling. It also did something that even Infinity War couldn’t: It passed $700m domestically. Only three films have ever done that, and Black Panther is the first Marvel movie to do so. It’s impossible to overlook Black Panther’s commercial, critical and cultural impact. The fact that audiences were still able to see it in the cinema in August is a testament to that.

Loser - Solo: A Star Wars Story

Alden Ehrenreich a Han and Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca in Solo A Star Wars Story

It seemed inevitable that this new era of Star Wars, where audiences are spoiled with a new film every year, would result in a flop eventually. For many, that label was stuck on Solo: A Star Wars Story from day one, but fears were only exacerbated when original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were sacked midway through production. Ron Howard took over directing duties, extensive reshoots took place (which pushed the budget to $250m), and Disney and Lucasfilm decided to keep the movie’s May 2018 release. While reviews were solid, the buzz was tepid and audiences just didn’t seem all that interested in a Han Solo origin story.

RELATED: Why Star Wars Doesn’t Work In China, According To Donnie Yen

11 weeks into its release and Solo has yet to make back its budget domestically. Worldwide, it's barely scraped past $390m, which will lead to a major write-off for both Disney and Lucasfilm. In terms of true box office flops this summer, Solo is really the only disaster, although it's unlikely Disney or Lucasfilm will struggle much in the aftermath given the gargantuan successes of everything else on their slate.

Winner - Deadpool 2

Peter Deadpool 2 X-Force

Surprising no one, the Merc With a Mouth came back with style in his big summer sequel, Deadpool 2, which introduced Josh Brolin as Cable and laid the groundwork for upcoming team-up movie X-Force (although the first version of X-Force turned out to be a bit of a false start). Deadpool 2 didn't quite manage to surpass the first movie, grossing $733 million worldwide compared to Deadpool's $783 million - but of course, the first Deadpool movie didn't have Infinity War to contend with. There's no question that this was a big win for 20th Century Fox, and overall both fans and critics seemed satisfied. We also got a great new Céline Dion song out of it.

Page 2: Hereditary, Eighth Grade, and Skyscraper

Toni Collette looking at someone on fire in Hereditary.

Winner – A24’s Hereditary and Eighth Grade

Indie giant A24 has climbed the ranks of independent and small-scale film distribution at a meteoric pace, thanks to successes like Moonlight, The Witch and Good Time. By now, their name has become a byword for a certain kind of indie movie experience, and critics and casual filmgoers alike are likely to see their interest in a project piqued by the distributor’s name alone. Dare we say it, A24 are now on the same level of indie movie prestige and celebration that Miramax achieved in the mid-1990s.

This summer, the distributor released a slew of hits big and small. Paul Schrader made a barnstorming return to form with the brilliant thriller First Reformed, and Andrew Haigh’s touching drama Lean On Pete picked up an array of glowing reviews. Yet their biggest players this year came in the form of two films that couldn't be more different from one another: The terrifying horror Hereditary, and the teen dramedy Eighth Grade.

Each film was a directorial debut with premises that could have been hard sells to general audiences. However, hanks to a savvy combination of well-made marketing, adoring critical praise and good timing, both have seen major box office results this summer. Hereditary may have proven divisive to audiences, but that didn't stop it from grossing just under $44m domestically - a new record for A24. Eighth Grade, the first film by comedian Bo Burnham, opened in 4 theaters with a staggering $263,797 weekend. It has since expanded to over 1000 theaters and has a cool $7.5m in the bank. A24 are kings of building hype and then creating an exhibiting schedule to match. Another indie studio, Annapurna, found success this season with Sorry To Bother You - proving that summer doesn't have to be just about blockbusters.

RELATED: Hereditary Director Answers the Movie's Biggest Questions

Loser – Skyscraper

Dwayne Johnson in Skyscraper poster

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has, by and large, been an unstoppable force of box office might. From the Fast and Furious series to Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the former wrestler has carved out a spot among Hollywood’s A-List and become one of the most profitable names in film. Johnson even managed to make Rampage - a video game adaptation involving a giant mutated gorilla - into a hit. Aside from a minor blip with the big-screen Baywatch movie, Johnson has become one of the rare actors in Hollywood who can open a movie based on his name alone.

Alas, that magic didn’t carry over to Skyscraper, a dour, wannabe-Die Hard action thriller that disappointed critics and audiences alike. The film opened at number 3, behind Hotel Transylvania 3 and Ant-Man and the Wasp, with around $25.4m - well below early estimates. Since then, the film has managed to do better business overseas, but nowhere near Johnson's best. Audiences weren't as excited for a Johnson action movie without his usual cheeky charm. However, this domestic downturn won't dent Johnson's box office might too much, as he remains a favorite with audiences in China (Skyscraper was primarily made to appeal to that audience).

Page 3: Incredibles 2, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Darkest Minds

Winner - Incredibles 2

It’s been 14 years since Brad Bird made his Pixar debut with The Incredibles, a savvy and mega stylish superhero movie that combined genre satire, family comedy and impeccably done action. As Pixar moved more heavily into franchising their output – Toy Story 4 is on the horizon, following movies like Monsters University, Finding Dory and Cars 3 – it seemed inevitable that the Parr family would get a second outing. But how would audiences react to a second Incredibles movie almost a decade and a half since the first one, and in an era where superhero movies are the bedrock of Hollywood?

Incredibles 2 opened to record breaking numbers. Its $180m opening weekend represented a new peak for animated films and was also the eighth largest opening of all time domestically. It topped $1bn worldwide, but the most surprising fact about that number is that the majority of that gross - over 55% - came from American audiences. This was a major tent-pole release that did not need to rely on international numbers for the lion's share of its box office take. Given continuing fears that North American audiences are rejecting the cinematic experience, this can certainly be chalked up as a major victory in Disney's corner.

RELATED: Incredibles 2 Crosses the $1 Billion Mark Worldwide

Loser – The Darkest Minds

Skylan Brooks Miya Cech Amandla Stenberg Harris Dickinson The Darkest Minds

The young adult boom that followed the successes of Twilight and The Hunger Games feels like an era away. It’s only been a few years since these franchise adaptations of wildly popular YA novels were bringing in billions of dollars at the box office, yet more recent efforts have offered increasingly diminishing returns. While a slew of paranormal romance movies followed in the sparkly footsteps of Twilight, to mixed results, the dystopian copycats of The Hunger Games seemed to have shorter shelf lives. Earlier in 2018, the final and long-delayed film in The Maze Runner series, The Death Cure, opened to disappointing returns. The Divergent series didn’t even get an ending as its third film flopped hard enough for the franchise to be shelved completely.

The Darkest Minds marked the live-action debut of Kung Fu Panda 2 director Jennifer Yuh Nelson and starred Amandla Stenberg, who played Rue in The Hunger Games. The adaptation of Jennifer Bracken’s popular dystopian series looked good on paper – a group of teenagers with mysterious powers escape an internment camp and go on the run from the government – but it couldn’t help but feel hopelessly out of trend by the time it premiered. In its opening weekend, it barely scraped to the number 8 spot on the box office with a gross of $5.8m from 3127 theatres.

The books have their fans, but they never reached the stratospheric heights of success that made The Hunger Games so huge, so there wasn’t much of a built-in fanbase for the film. Add to that mediocre reviews and general disinterest on the genre and this one sank on arrival. YA trends come and go, and often it’s tough for Hollywood to keep up. Here’s hoping Stenberg’s next YA movie, an adaptation of the political drama The Hate U Give, fares better.

Winner – Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom promo art

J.A. Bayona's sequel to Colin Trevorrow's successful 2015 reboot Jurassic World may not have thrilled critics much, but it did prove one thing for sure: audiences still love dinosaurs. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has so far grossed more than $1.27 billion worldwide since its mid-June release, with the bulk of that box office take (68%) coming from overseas markets. The movie did particularly well in China, where it grossed a staggering $248 million - proving once again that a successful release in China has the power to make or break a blockbuster (though in this case, the movie would have done just fine even without that extra quarter-million).

It may have been divisive among fans and critics, but there's no denying that the reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise has been a massive commercial success for Universal Pictures, and we won't have to wait long for the next movie. Jurassic World 3 is set for release in 2021, with Trevorrow returning to direct a story that will deal with the fallout of Fallen Kingdom's game-changing ending.

Page 4: Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, and The Meg

Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, & Ving Rhames in Mission Impossible Fallout

Winner – Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Over the course of 22 years, the Mission: Impossible franchise has endured well beyond audience and industry expectations. The series has gone from strength to strength, both commercially and critically, as well as allowing its leading man Tom Cruise to indulge his every movie star whim. It turns out that’s exactly what audiences want from Cruise, whose public image had taken a major hit following his ardent Scientology support. Movie lovers want to see Cruise doing daring stunts and being an old-school action man, something the Mission: Impossible movies offer with gusto.

RELATED: Mission: Impossible 6 Has Franchise Best Second Weekend

The sixth addition to the franchise, Fallout, didn’t just delight audiences - it had critics proclaiming it as one of the best action movies ever made. With its formula perfected and the continuing promise of intense stunts as performed by Cruise himself, audiences in America drove Fallout to franchise best numbers in its opening weekend. In its second week, it managed to hold off competition from Disney's Christopher Robin with ease, and it's already made back over double its budget worldwide.

Winner – Documentaries

Mr. Rogers with a puppet

Traditionally, documentaries have always been popular with audiences, but getting them to leave the house and pay cinema price tickets to see was a different matter. Documentaries are typically viewed as a niche box office interest, akin to foreign language films. It’s also a gap in the market that Netflix have been filling with great success, with their roster of original feature length, short and documentary series picking them up a slew of awards, including an Oscar. Yet this Summer, it seemed that movie-going audiences were hungry for true stories.

The season brought a wide selection of critically acclaimed documentaries that saw bigger than expected box office numbers: RGB, focusing on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; the long-awaited biography of Mr. Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?; McQueen, centered on the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen; the Sundance hit Three Identical Strangers; and Generation Wealth, a look into the world of the mega rich. The highest grossing documentaries tend to center on divisive politics or concerts of major music stars, so to see a Summer of stories as varied as these documentaries offered getting major love with audiences proved to be one of the real surprises of the season.

Surprise Winner: The Meg

The Meg poster

Much to the surprise of basically everyone, Jason Statham's giant shark movie, The Meg, not only managed to top the US box office this weekend with around $44.5m, grossing just under $100m worldwide. That's an impressive showing for a film that's not part of a franchise or established property. For Warner Bros., The Meg also proved to be their biggest opening weekend of 2018 so far, according to the Hollywood Reporter. That's no mean feat given that its studio siblings include Stephen Spielberg's Ready Player One and the recent Ocean's 8.

The overseas grosses were greatly bolstered in China, where Gravity Pictures put up a major portion of the film's budget. For a film with a budget of around $150m and middling reviews, those numbers are a minor miracle. The movie isn't out of deep waters just yet but this is a heartily encouraging start. It seems we can all agree on the majesty of a giant shark.

MORE: The Highest-Grossing Movies Of 2018 (So Far)