The calendar might say that summer begins on June 20, but in the movie business the season began Friday with the opening of "Iron Man."

The summer movie season used to start toward the end of June and run through Labor Day. The picture credited with turning summer into Hollywood's annual profit center — "Jaws" — opened on June 20, 1975.

But, as the number of potential summer blockbusters increased, the season was bumped back to Memorial Day weekend in the 1980s.

Over the past decade, the studios kept pushing release dates into early May. Everyone now seems to agree that you can't open a big film earlier than the first Friday of May and still call it a "summer" movie.

So, "Iron Man" has kicked off the season and I'm happy to report the movie definitely works as all-ages entertainment.

Kids will love the clear-cut heroism and villainy borrowed directly from the original Marvel comic book, as well as the nonstop action.

Parents will be happy to see that the PG-13 rating is a fair assessment of the cartoonish violence in the action sequences — there is no form of violence in the film that you won't see on broadcast television any night of the week

The Motion Picture Association of American rating description also cites "brief suggestive content" — that is most likely a reference to the female Vanity Fair reporter played by Leslie Bibb who is (briefly) shown to be willing to spend the night with a source in order to get a story.

What's

Advertisement
unusual about "Iron Man" — for a summer comic book film — is the continual, offbeat wit provided by Robert Downey Jr. in the title role.

Downey gives the film the same sort of unexpected mature edge that Johnny Depp supplied in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.

Older teens and adults will never feel that they're at a kids' picture, the way many of us did at last summer's "Transformers," which suffered from lackluster casting and general silliness.

Movie ticket sales have been tepid over the past month, but "Iron Man" should get everyone in the mood for regular visits to the local multiplexes for the next four months.