The story of Hollywood’s box office returns this year is starting to look like an edge-of-your-seat suspense thriller.

Despite smash hits like “Avengers: Endgame,” “Toy Story 4” and “Captain Marvel,” cinema receipts are off nearly 10% year to date, according to Comscore.

The scary drop, which comes even as the crucial summer season is in full swing, is creating anxiety in Tinseltown that 2019 could be a clunker.

Studios have been hit by a less noticed but costly series of recent bombs. Among them are “Dark Phoenix,” the X-Men finale that cost Fox $200 million to make but only raked in $63.9 million.

Warner Bros.’ “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” meanwhile, grossed $107 million despite a budget of $170 million, and “Men in Black: International,” which cost Sony $110 million to shoot, drew just $66.1 million at theaters.

In addition, Entertainment Studios’ “Replicas,” Warner Bros.’ “Shaft” and Fox’s “The Kid Who Would Be King” didn’t come close to recouping their budgets.

Experts blame weak receipts on such factors as moviegoer fatigue, overworked superhero franchises and the studios’ recent obsession with how to compete against Netflix, as well as Disney+ and the soon-to-launch video-streaming services from Universal and Warner Bros.

Other insiders cite last year’s flameout of MoviePass, which claimed to account for 6% of domestic ticket sales in the first half of 2018. Without MoviePass’s $10-a-month cinema subscription service, which began to implode last year at this time, a ticket costs more than its monthly streaming subscription.

What’s more, Netflix continues to post impressive numbers. Last month, the streaming giant said its Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston project, “Murder Mystery,” had the “biggest opening weekend ever” for a homegrown production, attracting 30.9 million subscribers despite being throttled by critics.

But if things look bad now, keep in mind that at the end of February, the North American box office was off 30% from the year-earlier period, according to Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore.

The release of “Black Panther” on last year’s Presidents Day weekend produced gate receipts of $202 million, crushing the all-time record for February as well as this February’s releases, including “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.”

“From that perspective, being down less than 10% at midyear doesn’t seem so bad,” Dergarabedian said.

Indeed, the Comscore analyst believes 2019 could still top last year’s North American box office record of $11.9 billion.

“Big pronouncements about some sort of transcendental sea change are overstated,” he said. “Fears about the movie business crop up every couple of years, but the only thing that matters is the finish line.”

For starters, Dergarabedian is anticipating “a killer July” — a month that’s about to take off with “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” which set a record for Tuesdays when it opened on July 2 with ticket sales of $39.2 million.

Spidey, however, will merely set the table for “The Lion King,” which many observers predict will be among the biggest box office generators of all time within months of its July 19 release.

“We could be in a completely different environment in just a couple of weeks,” Dergarabedian said. What’s more, he said the year will likely finish on a super-high note, thanks to the Dec. 20 opening of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”

To fans, “Star Wars 9” is the final episode of the nine-part Skywalker saga, but to Dergarabedian, it’s “an 800-pound gorilla capable of killing all gloom and doom.”