We’ve still got a couple of weeks left in August, but for all intents and purposes the summer movie season is over and all of the major blockbusters are now behind us. Although it’s pretty common to feel burnt out on big budget effects-driven movies around this time, for me the feeling seems a little more pronounced than usual. We’ve been hearing a lot of complaints about this year’s big movies being little more than “destruction porn” and it’s true that almost every action flick has been pretty relentless on that front. But is this year’s crop of blockbusters actually any worse than previous years?

As we’ve come to expect, there were a ton of sequels this year and most of them ranged from mediocre to bad. However, this year’s non-sequels were arguably even worse with movies like The Lone Ranger, After Earth and R.I.P.D. being both critical and commercial failures. Clearly, studios will continue to avoid taking chances on something new in the future. That being said, this summer is supposedly still on track to be the highest grossing summer of all time, so clearly people are still paying to see this stuff. What do you think? Was there still plenty of fun to be had at the movies this summer? Why did so many of the original tentpoles fail? Are blockbusters slowly becoming nothing more than destruction porn? Give us your thoughts here on Open Forum Friday.