For once, I empathize with Hollywood. In a post this week entitled "Time to Panic: Inside the Movie Business' Summer of Hell," Variety detailed Hollywood's disastrous summer of 2017. And truly, the only way this summer could have been more hellacious for the industry is if they'd actually had to sit down and watch one of their own films. I mean, people: you put The Emoji Movie out into the world—a 90-minute animated star turn for the Meh face—is a lukewarm audience reaction any surprise?

As movie industry analyst Jeff Bock tells Variety: "The talk of last summer was Stranger Things, and the talk this summer is Game of Thrones. It used to be 'What's playing this summer in theaters?'" And yes—while television was taking us places we'd never been, what was playing this summer in theaters? A fifth Transformers. A fifth Pirates of the Caribbean. A millionth Planet of the Apes, a trillionth Alien. For the kids, third installments of the Cars and Despicable Me franchises, movies their older siblings wore out on DVD in the family crossover years ago. The third full reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, barely 15 years after the first one came out, and a Lego re-imagining of the Batman story. Bruce Wayne went on to do some questionable things in his life, and he only had to watch his parents get killed once; can you blame us for staying home and saving our pennies? And it's not just our imagination. Ticket sales are down 10.8 percent this summer and nearly 3 percent for the year.

Michael Bay on the set of Transformers: Last Knight. Shutterstock

When we think of creatively and commercially successful summer movie seasons, we think of the mid-1990s: Speed, Con Air, Bad Boys, Men in Black, Armageddon. In the summer of 2017, Hollywood shoved a million tired concepts down our throats, with a bang and a swoosh and $25 RealD, and what they tried to pass off as new wasn't particularly new: The Mummy, The Dark Tower, King Arthur. Even the best-reviewed and most successful of the action blockbusters— Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2— still had Wonder and Galaxy in their titles. If you're not a superhero person, or if your itch for tights and capes has been somehow been scratched by the last hundred Marvel and DC movies, this summer movie season was especially bleak.

STX Entertainment

Studios also made the questionable decision to supersize their summer blockbusters. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Spider-Man: Homecoming, all over two hours. Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets made my eyes bleed for 140 minutes. The utterly joyless and mechanical Transformers: The Last Night had a two and a half hour running time, and would have had me checking my watch at half that. If you're going to make a movie too absurd for an adult to engage with, make it short enough for a child to endure. At the end of summer 2017, I find myself with an irrational fear of colons.

It's also important to consider that we're living in the Age of the Constant Blockbuster. The summer movie season starts in April now, and continues right on through The August of the Low-Expectation Blockbuster. Then we're into the September/October of the Spooky Blockbuster With The Filthy Child Or Spooky Doll. From there we move to November, and two months of the Family and/or Oscar-Bait Blockbuster, before we're into 2018 and a Summer Blockbuster season that for all we know will start in February with an R-rated comedy reimagining of NYPD Blue. (Badges better beware! Starring John Cena and Josh Gad, in 3D IMAX.) (Probably.)

Sony Pictures

Quite simply, we have Dazzle Fatigue. We have seen every special effect. We have whooshed and swooped through enough CGI cityscapes. We have witnessed more zero-stakes animated stunts than we can count. The rare movies that did work—Baby Driver, Girls Trip, probably a third— served up what we come to the movies to see: character, practical stunts, a dollop of originality. We also got a few tiny gems—The Big Sick, Beatriz at Dinner, and God help us The Book of Henry— which appealed to audiences simply because they could go in confident that nothing would explode.

It is tempting to think that this summer will teach Hollywood a lesson, but of course it will not: The Mummy kicks off a long series of Universal monster movies, and Marvel and Disney have their sequels, spinoffs, and reboots planned at three-month intervals until your children turn 100.

So…what's on TV?

Dave Holmes Editor-at-Large Dave Holmes is Esquire's L.A.-based editor-at-large.

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