Summer blockbusters we somehow missed

Summer blockbusters are hugely popular and as a result, financially successful, and seen by lots of people. So with summer blockbuster season coming to a close, we decided to revisit our conversation about our own personal blockbuster gaps, and finally watch a movie that absolutely everyone saw – except for us — including Armageddon, Beverly Hills Cop II, Ghost, The Fast and the Furious. If you need a bit more summer magic, check out these episodes: What’s the best summer snack? The votes are in https://www.npr.org/2026/07/27/nx-s1-5906368/whats-the-best-summer-snack-the-votes-are-in ‘Jaws’ is still stuck in our teeth, 50 years later https://www.npr.org/2025/08/28/nx-s1-5518187/jaws-is-still-stuck-in-our-teeth-50-years-later We debate the sweatiest movie of all time https://www.npr.org/2024/06/19/1197965247/we-debate-the-sweatiest-movie-of-all-time Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  Vin Diesel says, "Smoke him." And, you know, they spoke him. He gets smoked. And that's the whole sequence. That's the point of it. And I was sitting there going like, Vin Diesel, at the time of this, you were in your 30s. What are you doing?

• 0:27Speaker 02

  What are you doing?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Everyone knows what a summer blockbuster is. It's a film that's hugely popular and as a result financially successful. By definition, it's a movie seen by lots and lots of people.

• 0:42Speaker 03

  But there have been a lot of summer blockbusters over the years, and not everyone has seen every last one of them. So with summer blockbuster season coming to a close, we decided to revisit our conversation about our own personal blockbuster gaps and finally see a movie that absolutely everyone saw, except for us. I'm Stephen Thompson.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  And I'm Glen Weldon. And today on this encore episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're talking about summer blockbusters we have never seen until now.

• 1:16Speaker 00

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• 2:41Speaker 01

  Joining us today is Ronald Young Jr. He's the host of the Film and Television Review Podcast, Leaving the Theater. Hey, Ronald.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Hello, Glenn.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Hey. And also joining us is one of our producers here on Pop Culture Happy Hour, Liz Metzger in front of the mic. Hey, Liz.

• 2:55Speaker 06

  Hello.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Hello. So we asked everyone to bring in one summer blockbuster that they recently watched for the first time. Let's get started. Stephen, this is going to be an exercise, I think, in feeling cut off from the mainstream. What big summer blockbuster missed you that you have finally watched? And why?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Well, I'll get to that in a second. It's absolutely wild to admit that I have never seen the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  You should be ashamed of yourself. How dare you, Stephen?

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Now, for those who've never seen Armageddon, we're going to do a quick NPR-style "The Batman is a Crime Fighter."

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Armageddon is the Michael Bay movie where Bruce Willis is like the world's greatest oil driller. And he leads a ragtag group of misfits on a mission to blow up a killer asteroid that is hurtling toward Earth. Said asteroid is the size of Texas, we are told. Armageddon not to be confused with Deep Impact, which was the other killer asteroid movie in the summer of 1998. I think I never actually saw it because everyone I worked with said it was terrible. And that was that. I never really had a reason to revisit it until we inexplicably decided to embark on this particular project. And it is so fascinating to revisit this movie more than 25 years after it came out

• 4:21Speaker 03

  because it feels like both a pre-September 11 relic, complete with the destruction of one of the World Trade Center buildings. And it also feels like a post-September 11 relic, complete with the inexplicable destruction of Paris. This movie is such ludicrous trash. I, renowned non-astrophysicist that I am, I sat there with my arms folded like a little Neil deGrasse Tyson. Just like, it's not so much like, I don't understand physics, but I do understand basic logic. And the way everything happens in space, the way everything hurtles against each other, nothing makes any sense at all.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Every explosion, and there are so many explosions, it's like whatever object is exploding is just inexplicably covered in jet fuel at the time. The asteroid isn't just like five miles wide or whatever, like a giant asteroid would be. It's the size of Texas. Entire cities in this film are leveled as like scene setting. At one point, they blow up Paris just for funsies. There are these long, pointless digressions. Liv Tyler is shot so glamorously.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  There's a gun in space, don't forget that.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  There's also a gun in space. And it's just sitting there like, oh, that's, something's going to happen there.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Chekhov's asteroid. The action in this movie, especially once they're all pantsing around on this asteroid, the action set pieces make no sense at all. I will say, watching this film, it did make me think about how much I miss DVD commentary tracks. Because like Ben Affleck, like very famously, his DVD commentary track for this movie is considered one of the great, just shade-throwing exercises in the history of commentary tracks. It's such a doofy movie. If you want 500 shots from the asteroid's point of view, this is the movie for you.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  But there's something about this like that is a bit of an origin story for Michael Bay and his direction to come because Armageddon is his third movie. His first two were Bad Boys, then The Rock. His third movie was Armageddon. He follows that up with Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys 2, The Island, and then straight into Transformers.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  And if you look at all of those movies, they could, there's a lot of ways in which, from the cinematography, from the way that people interact with each other, he is setting the standard for what a blockbuster is going to be in the future. And there's people who make blockbusters that are borrowing elements from this, including, I think, at least one we're going to talk about later, that are borrowing elements from this film, which is, he has a good sense of what the masses go to the theaters for, which I don't think necessarily is a good thing for us that like want to see a good movie and also want to be entertained. They've just slide directly just into entertainment, which means that every single thing you said, Stephen, is exactly right. But I guess people just don't care when they're looking at it on the giant screen, you know?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Well, it's the difference between being entertained and being pandered to.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  This movie is doing a lot of pandering. People went to the hell out of this movie as like objectively bad as I thought this film was. By the end, like the music has been pummeling you for two and a half hours. You do have a certain like, aww.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Can I ask you about that music, Stephen? Like, "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," the Aerosmith song. Did that play?

• 7:53Speaker 07

  I don't want to close my eyes.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Did that play during the movie or just over the credits?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  So basically, there is a scene that invokes the song where it kind of comes up. It's a scene, it was sung by Steven Tyler, and it is a love scene with his daughter, Liv Tyler. It's invoked, it kind of comes up almost as a teaser about halfway through the movie during kind of a moment of respite. And then it just like booms through the closing credits.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  It is a very effective song. I dunk on Diane Warren a lot, but that song is doing work.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Liz, do you have any Armageddon thoughts? Have you seen this film?

• 8:44Speaker 06

  I was but a wee lass when this movie came out. I would not have been allowed in the theater. Except on baby day.

• 8:53Speaker 06

  I mean, I think bad sci fi movies, specifically bad science sci fi movies are good because they have bad science rules. But does this movie have bad science rules? Or do you feel like it's just like we're glossing over? Cause I-

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Both.

• 9:09Speaker 06

  It has both. And it was very like, we never want to pay taxes again. Am I right?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a good demand if you think about it.

• 9:17Speaker 06

  It's a good demand. That's honestly what you should be asking.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  100%. Yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, that is Armageddon. Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson. Ronald Young, Jr., what's your pick? And why'd you miss it?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  My pick was Beverly Hills Cop 2.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Beverly Hills Cop, the original. Again, it's a fish out of water story starring Detroit cop Axel Foley, as portrayed by Eddie Murphy. It is a fish out of water buddy cop movie in which this black detective from Detroit is solving a crime in the hoity toity and largely white Beverly Hills. This plot, that is the plot of Beverly Hills Cop, that is also the plot of Beverly Hills Cop 2, which came out in 1987. I was born in 1984. That's when Beverly Hills Cop came out. Beverly Hills Cop 2 came out in 1987. So it was not of the Eddie Murphy era that I know. The Eddie Murphy era that I know involves the Nutty Professor. It involves life. So this wasn't my era is the thing.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  But I will say, watching this for the first time, I realized that this is kind of, in a lot of ways, the prototype for the modern buddy cop movie.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  I enjoyed the movie. There's a lot of Eddie Murphy. I'm getting a lot of the origin of what he's doing. We're still finding out what his personality is. Watching this movie, he had already done 48 hours. So it just feels like as he's moving forward his career, this is an inflection point, but it's also specifically so many bigger things happening in the second one versus the first one. For instance, there's a cement mixer armored truck car chase, which is just something that you would only put into a blockbuster. But so many blockbuster beats in this film for it to be a sequel. And we complain about IPs and sequels now. And this is something that just has been a fact of Hollywood for decades.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Had you not seen Beverly Hills Cop 1 also? Or had you seen that and just not seen this? Why'd you pick this one?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Glen Weldon, I watched both movies in about a three and a half hour span, back to back. But sorry, go ahead.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Then you'll be able to answer my question because my memory is that Beverly Hills Cop 1 was a much shaggier gamble, where they were kind of like betting on the charisma of one Mr. Eddie Murphy. And Beverly Hills Cop 2, what seemed like all the edges had been sanded down. It had been engineered to be a blockbuster, down to the big final scene in a warehouse at a time when every action movie ended in a warehouse. Is that true?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yes. But I will say the first two acts of Beverly Hills Cop are exactly what you're saying, that shaggy mess that you're talking about. By act three of Beverly Hills Cop, they've dialed it in. Once they figure that out, in act three of Beverly Hills Cop, Beverly Hills Cop 2 is all act three. It's all wise cracking Eddie Murphy firing guns and the two other police detectives that he's working with, all working together to solve this crime against like the, the crotchety lieutenant or police chief. We're gonna do it no matter what. We don't care what this guy says. We don't go by the book. Yeah, exactly. All of that like happens. That's the entire movie. And again, that's setting the tone for every buddy cop movie that comes after it in terms of like the modernity of these films.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  They know what worked.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  How does it age? I mean, I remember, one thing I remember about Beverly Hills Cop is there's this long kind of awful aside where it's just like Eddie Murphy doing gay voice.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  That does not age well, obviously. What does age well is black folks' interaction with the police department. There's ways that there where I was like, well, this could have been made last week. And then you see Eddie Murphy going to gay voice and you're like, well, this could have been made in 1987.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Completely different.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  All right. Well, that is Beverly Hills Cop 2 and also theoretically Beverly Hills Cop 1. Thank you very much, Ronald Young, Jr. Liz Metzger, what's your pick?

• 13:02Speaker 06

  I picked 1990 Ghost, the thriller romance.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Good choice.

• 13:08Speaker 06

  Well, okay, we'll get into that. So-

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Oh, Liz, you in danger, girl.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. Nicely done.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  Patrick Swayze is in this. He is in a beautiful relationship with Demi Moore. They are this gorgeous couple. They've moved in together. She does pottery, but tragically he dies and becomes the said ghost. But the only way they can really communicate is thankfully Whoopi Goldberg, who is playing this sort of fortune teller medium. And they're able to communicate. This also stars Tony Goldwyn, who looks like a zoomer. Everything is actually very zoomer coded in this film. And it is a story about a love that lasts and that even if you die, you can come back, you can bother Whoopi Goldberg and also try to figure out who killed him.

• 14:02Speaker 06

  This is a film that I haven't watched for like specifically the reason that it terrified me as a child. Like I walked in on my parents watching this film and it begins with very ominous thriller music. Scary. There's dusty rooms. Scary. There's sexy pottery. Terrifying.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  There's pottery.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  And then soon after someone gets shot. Very terrifying. And then there's a home invasion. And that's when I walked out of the room.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 06

  So sitting this down, I was like, that's a movie. That's a movie. You got five Academy Award nominations and what's good is fun. What's not good is long. It's very long. It's over two hours. And I think Whoopi Goldberg is the best part. She's not in it enough. And Demi, she's so beautiful when she's crying and she's so confused. I don't know. It was a movie. I can't believe I was scared of this movie for years. Years.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  I grew up with my parents watching that in the other room. And for me, like especially being raised in a Pentecostal Christian household, I had conflicts with my preacher dad and missionary mom watching this movie where the demons are dragging people to hell. And I didn't even see it. I could only hear it in the other room. Can you imagine being a seven year old child hearing this in the other room? And you're like, why are you all watching this? Where's Jesus?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  The thing is, if you're only hearing the sound of someone being dragged to hell, you are being spared some of the jankest special effects.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Where is that?

• 15:38Speaker 03

  But there's one where you basically make out an outline of the scary beastie dragging the person to hell and it is so cheap looking.

• 15:46Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  I loved this movie when it came out. This movie came out the summer I turned 18 and I saw it at least once in the theater and cried all over the place. It is, on balance, still a movie I would recommend. And I agree that Whoopi Goldberg is very funny in it. I mean, that was, it's of an era where the comic relief performance was very likely to get you a best supporting actor or actress Oscar. And I think Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore are, they're, they're very wet eyed performers.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  I found them very compelling. I think Demi Moore in particular is very compelling in this movie.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I'm going to tell the story of when I saw this movie in the theater, even though it's a romance, and I wouldn't normally see a romance, I'm going to tell that story because it begins. So I was backpacking through Europe and I was a little homesick, I now realize, because there's no other explanation for why I would go see this movie. I had not experienced any kind of mass media in-

• 16:38Speaker 06

  For a full meal.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I turned this corner and there's this theater playing this big American movie with stars whose names I recognize. And it was like, why not? And I had never heard of the movie, but then I looked on the poster and I saw that it was directed by Jerry Zucker. And I was like, oh, right. Airplane, top secret. Police squad. This is gonna be great. It's not what I was expecting. And I sat down in the theater and the only thing I remember is that Whoopi was funny and Vincent Sciovele as the subway ghost. What a big swing. What a fun performance.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Ghost rules. Ghost sensei right there. Very, very leaf.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  And those shadows dragging Tony Goldwyn to hell. Yes, it looks janky, but in my sleep deprived, low blood sugar state, that was more profoundly unsettled than I was prepared to be at that time.

• 17:24Speaker 06

  The music cues are quite ominous.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Nah, can't do it.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  But the visual effects looks like somebody cut ghosts out of black construction paper.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  This also an unchained melody, right?

• 17:34Speaker 06

  It does. The pottery scene.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  There was a big kind of era for Unchained Melody, I think.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  All right. Thank you very much, Liz. Ghost, that's a pick. Okay. So when I looked down this list of top sellers, I was like, well, I've seen all these movies. I must be a special snowflake. Look at me. I'm such an aestheth. And then I realized, no, the definition of blockbusters, lots of people say it, it's not a thing that you've seen all these movies, Glenn. There was one franchise that I had not seen anything from, and I started off not seeing it because, you know, just it missed me, right? I mean, like, it wasn't a deliberate choice or anything. I just thought, well, that's probably not for me. Then about the fifth or sixth sequel, this franchise started achieving a kind of a cultural currency. Everyone was talking about them. That's when it became a deliberate choice on my part. I decided I would be the guy who has never seen any of these movies. You know, a small but still measurable percentage of my personality would be that I've never

• 18:38Speaker 01

  seen any films in the Fast and the Furious franchise. Look, in life, sometimes you know that some things are not for you. That's fine. These films don't need me. They have their fans. A discerning critic like Linda Holmes loves these movies. We talk about them all the time. She finds them ridiculous in a satisfying way. And I'm told by other people, oh, they're wild. They're over the top. And they use language that suggests to me that what camp is to gay men, Fast and Furious films are to straight people.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  So I've had friends who tried to sell me on these movies, saying, oh, you got to start with five. Five's when it gets fun.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  No, you start with four, not five.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Sorry, I have an opinion about this.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  But the thing is, Ronald, I looked it up, four, five, seven, and eight. And I'm calling them Fast and Furious four, five, seven, and eight, because I refuse to engage with their actual names, which are too stupid for me to acknowledge.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  They all opened in April, and I couldn't square that with our brief here, because April is not summer. I'm sorry, words mean things. So I started with the OG. I started with The Fast and the Furious, which premiered on June 22, 2001. Here's the plot. It stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker. Walker is a cop who is infiltrating the world of street racing to try to find a gang of elite drivers who are hijacking trucks. I would love to sit here and tell you guys, look, I was wrong. What a revelation. What a fun ride. I sincerely hope to sit here and go, I get it now. But 20 minutes in, my husband, who had also never seen any of these films, turned to me and he said to me what I was seconds away from turning to him to say, which was, I don't get this movie. People love them. I understand

• 20:12Speaker 01

  they get bigger and broader and sillier and more fun. That's a phrase people keep throwing at me. Oh, then they become spies. And I'm just going to sit here and dump on this movie that people love for the entire segment here. I'll just say that there is so much posturing and preening and tiresome kind of adolescent performance of masculinity that I just couldn't find a way in. I couldn't get a handle on it. There's like a moment where they pull up to a light, another car pulls up, and it's some rich d-bag, and they exchange words. And then Vin Diesel says, smoke him. And, you know, they smoke him. He gets smoked. And that's the whole sequence. That's the point. But then I was sitting there going like, Vin Diesel, at the time of this, you were in your 30s. What are you doing?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  What are you doing?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  We talked about Swayze, right? This guy had movie star charisma. And Diesel, the kind of charisma he has is dirtbag doing donuts in the Wawa parking lot charisma, right? And that's, it's not the same.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  He has lunk charisma. I will say this, like, everything you're saying is accurate. And I feel like this entire series is reprehensible. Even though I'm a big fan of it, it is also reprehensible.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Reprehensible?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Say more. Why reprehensible? Because everything you're saying is 100% true, especially when you get from Fast and the Furious to Fast and Furious and Tokyo Drift. I have to tell you, I know you've heard this before. Four, five, and six are good action movies. They're good. If you just sit down and have all the information you have about the first couple of movies and just watch four, five, and six, it's good. In seven, eight, and nine, it goes off the rails. Paul Walker dies. They decide that they can do anything they want. The Rock is pushing a missile with his bare hands on the ice. Like, it gets real, real, real bad. But there's a trilogy in the middle. It's actually just like Star Wars, if you think about it.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Okay. You're not going to convince me to keep going with this.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  No, I know I'm not.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I liked when the car went under the truck. I like the stunts. I liked being introduced to actor Rick Yoon, who plays the rival gang leader Johnny Tran. He is a strikingly hot individual. And I will be seeking out his body of work. I liked Ted Levine. He plays Paul Walker's weirdly sympathetic boss. But if you can spare me a few minutes on Wikipedia, what's to recommend these films?

• 22:30Speaker 06

  Someone told me that the first Fast and Furious was a lot like watching the first Magic Mike, because it takes itself really seriously and has this filter of deep, deep tone, where you're like, this is the underbelly. They're doing something not above the law. I think this is a movie that's silly. And I think sometimes you just got to watch a movie silly. And also stunts, I will say. Maybe that's just me that like, kind of a second screening it where you're like, I'm going to look up, we're going to watch a really sick practical effects stunt, more or less.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:00Speaker 06

  And then I'm going to look down, and then I'm going to hear the sound. There's a race. I'm going to look up, and I'm going to look back down.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  I appreciate the practical effects. I love a cool looking car going fast, but spare me the talk of family.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  We want to know what you think about our picks. And we also want to know what summer blockbusters you need to catch up on, too. And now that I see it, I'm like, sometimes you don't need to. That brings us to the end of our show. Ronald Young Jr., Liz Metzger, Stephen Thompson. Thank you so much for being here.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 23:29Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Hafsa Fathma and Lennon Sherburne and edited by Mike Katzif. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. And Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

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