The 20 films that defined the term 'summer blockbuster'

The movie that started it all. Jaws was the first ever summer blockbuster. With lines down the block to see Steven Spielberg's monster classic, the film defined the subgenre with taut pacing, textured atmosphere, and definitive character development.

More Spielberg! The director is to summer blockbusters what beach towels are to summer--the base for an escapist afternoon. His tale of a theme park centered around dinosaurs is a monumental feat of terrifying whimsy.

Action? Check. Fantasy? Check. An adventure for all ages? Check. While this might not be a masterpiece, it checks a lot of boxes for a successful summer blockbuster, the kind of action flick that is easy to watch and never too intense--Depp would face a far more terrifying poop deck at home. 

The latest Barbie is made of anything but plastic. A funny, humane, and incredibly original blockbuster from the mind of Greta Gerwig, it's a movie about Barbie discovering how much more there is to life than being incredibly, incredibly good-looking. A sublime blockbuster, indeed.

Who knew that Tom Cruise playing volleyball shirtless would lead to tons of money at the box office...besides everybody? The mix of action and bromance is what blockbuster action is all about. 

Not all summer blockbusters are dudes playing volleyball shirtless and monsters wreaking havoc on our skyscrapers. Some of them are simply about love. Nancy Meyers is a director who turns the search for love into a blockbuster spectacle, with star-studded casts, escapist locations and in this case, the sensual charms of Cameron Diaz. 

Hey, you guuuuuuuuys!  I've got a summer blockbuster for the whole family. As a group of friends try to save their house from foreclosure, they end up stumbling into a treasure hunt for lost gold. It's epic, atmospheric and adorable cinema.  

He'll be back in loads of crappy sequels, but the Terminator found his robotic stride in the second installment from James Cameron. Doing what he did with Aliens, Cameron takes dark, controlled and sinewy source material and morphs it into blockbuster gold. There aren't many movie plots as entertaining as the Terminator's mission to keep a youngster safe from a killer robot. 

This movie is objectively a mess and the plot is more complicated to follow than a car manual. But hey, when there's cars falling from planes and bank safes drifting through traffic, you gotta watch with dazzled eyes. Plus, family. 

An even greater spectacle of vehicular ballet, Fury Road  is a one-way street down apocalyptic mayhem. As Charlize Theron steals a fuel truck with a group of female models, things take a turn into operatic violence thanks to George Miller's direction, which emphasizes stunts over digital effects.

Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, a bank heist, and a bunch of babes. What dude isn't watching Point Break? Throw in muscular, controlled, and viscerally confident direction from Katheryn Bigelow and you've got a summer blockbuster classic. 

Some of the best summer blockbusters take place over summer, playing on our collective enjoyment of sunshine, vacation and escapist locales. The Parent Trap is one such film--a film about twins swapping identities to get their parents back together over summer break. 

A spinning top of a movie in which you never know where it's going to go, Inception is what summer blockbusters needed when it arrived in theaters. An action movie with brains, it was the heady answer to mindless brutes breaking stuff on screen. 

Jaws walked so Star Wars could run into a spaceship, crank into hyperspeed, and launch itself into the highest-grossing franchise ever. It's hard to imagine what movies would look like without Star Wars, the influence implanted in nearly every science fiction movie and movie hero, but we're glad it exists. 

One of the greatest family movies and one of the greatest Reese's ads, E.T. had audiences over the moon with the story of an alien befriending a group of children. The visual effects were incredible, but the story is what got audiences to care. Who knew that a weird-looking alien could get so many people to cry? 

This is one of those movies with a small budget that turned into a giant event when people found out how good it was. When two singles spend a magical night with each other, audiences feel they have just experienced something special as well. A movie that transcends blockbuster.

The original Alien was a claustrophobic nightmare that put you in the shoes of people stuck on a plane with a ravenous alien. The sequel, however, took that premise and turned into a gloriously gory action flick. Both are great, but only one qualifies as a blockbuster.

Action, adventure, Sandra Bullock. Most people don't wanna spend hours on a bus, but when that bus might explode on screen and you get to watch Sandra Bullock in action, you bet people are going to get on board.

Do you remember when Disney used to make original movies? Now it's all sequels and remakes. Wall-e was an audaciously original production, in which hardly a word is spoken. As a robot cleans up an abandoned planet, audiences are treated to a universe of original ideas, images and characters. 

This film is simply wonderful. A story of a fish becoming a human, it's alive with poetic images, lyrical ideas and incredibly cute moments.