Summer usually brings long days, swimming pools, ice cream, and no school. Now, it seems that blockbuster movies have become another pastime of the season.

The months of May, June, and July might be the big season for large-budget films these days, but that wasn’t always the case. Des Moines Register writer and Datebook editor Kevin Cox pinpoints one film that began the craze about 25 years ago.

“I think it started with `Jaws’ in1976,” he says. “[Summer] was sort of a wasteland, but `Jaws’ changed all of that. It kind of mushroomed from there.”

Although the Steven Spielberg classic could be said to have started the craze, there were other factors that helped to make this time of the year a magnet for these kind of pictures.

“It doesn’t take a lot of time in Hollywood for someone to see a great idea and try to copy it,” Cox says. “The media picked up on the trend of the blockbuster summer season and they sort of fed off of each other.”

John Beavers, manager of the Varsity Theaters in Campustown, understands the importance of the summer to large movie production companies.

“The kids are out of school, everybody’s on vacation, and that’s when [the companies] promote and put out most of their blockbuster movies,” he says. “That’s when they can make most of their revenue because people have more free time.”

How the summer season is defined, including when it begins, is still changing. According to both Cox and Beavers, this year’s festival of blockbusters began earlier this month with the release of “The Mummy Returns.”

The times that Cox pinpoints as the big weekends for movie companies to shoot for are the holidays, Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

“The biggest films will get those times a year in advance, which actually helps because a production company will not want to release a smaller film because the blockbuster will crush it,” he says. “Now you can show your first ads a year before [the movies] come out.”

Even though the limits of the beginning of the season are not fixed, there seems to be a distinct time where movie companies will end their run of blockbuster hits.

“Once you get into August, things start dying out,” Cox says. “People have spent their money on a lot of big films [and] just start getting tired of it all. It’s a little bit more risky whether you’re going to have a successful movie.”

A strategy that Cox eludes to is the fact that new releases will be seen in intervals instead of one lump sum.

“Not a whole lot of films come out on the same weekend,” he says. “This gives people a chance to see what’s coming out week to week. What this translates to is a big box office on opening weekend, which is what movie companies really want. It’s just a matter of pure economics.”

According to the Datebook editor, most films that will be released in this part of Iowa will be geared towards the family. With big films like “Planet of the Apes”, “A.I.”, and “Pearl Harbor” coming over the span of the summer season, theaters won’t be hesitant to give more than one screen to a certain movie.

“These are films that are so big that the theater owners know that they can make a lot of money by showing them on more than one screen,” Cox says. “It’s one of these cases that you will have a sixteen screen theater and only eight films showing.”

Varsity Theaters may not be able to compete with the space of a larger-sized theater, but its location gives it a chance to appeal to a different kind of audience.

“One thing about this theater most people don’t realize is that this is not a conventional theater,” Beavers says. “This is more of a student-oriented theater. We base our time period on the student’s time period.”

Beavers acknowledges that while the student population is down by about 60 percent because of summer break, there is another reason business can stay where it normally is.

“People are anticipating summer movies more than any other movies any other time of the year,” he says. “We have such high expectations for the product from the consumer that attendance during the summer is usually as high as it is at any other time.”

With so many choices of films to be released over the next few months, this season may be one to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

“It’s just a good time to switch off your brain and have a good time,” Cox says.