So Much For Summer Movie Dumpster Fire 2017!

Welp, Summer Movie Dumpster Fire 2017 has finally come to a close, and what a brutal season it was! Cineplexes nationwide are littered with the rotted, bloating corpses of stale sequels, ill-advised reboots and failed franchise attempts.

It's not just my imagination either. According to industry insiders, Labor Day 2017 was the lowest grossing box office weekend since 2000! 

In fact, the number one movie this past weekend, The Hitman's Bodyguard, and could only manage to scrape up a dismal and embarrassing $10.3 million! The news gets worse— the top twelve movies playing over the Labor Day weekend grossed a combined $51 million! Heck, a good summer movie should be able to make that much on its own!

Studio executives are pointing fingers in every direction, like a finger pointing champ on National Finger Pointing Day. They're blaming the box office slump on streaming (of course), piracy, Hurricane Harvey (how many moviegoers could possibly live in Houston?), the Mayweather/McGregor fight, and of course their old standby, Rotten Tomatoes.

Naturally they seem to have completely missed the most obvious reason for the decline: the movies they're pumping out are pure crap! 

Who the hell wants to spend $12 bucks and make a special trip to the cineplex to see such classics as Leap!, Annabelle: Creation, The Emoji Movie, Kidnap, The Glass Castle, Tulip Fever or the aforementioned The Hitman's Bodyguard, a movie so bland and mediocre that I doubt Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson would have watched it unless they were contractually bound to attend at the premiere.

I can personally attest to this dearth of watchable films in theaters. I generally go to the movies once a week, and let me tell you, it was tough finding something worth seeing this past weekend. Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought so, as the parking lot of my local cineplexery was virtually empty.

I'd either seen everything or had no interest in what was playing, so I settled for watching the 40th Anniversary re-release of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind! Seriously! A four decade-old (oy) movie that I own on DVD and blu ray and have seen at least fifty times. 

 That's a pretty sad state of affairs when the only movie worth seeing is one that came out back in 1977. I saw Close Encounters in the theater back in '77, and I never dreamed I'd be watching it again forty years later because it was the only decent film playing.

On the other hand, it was fun seeing Close Encounters on a big screen again, with a really loud kickass sound system. And believe it or not, I wasn't the only person in the audience, like I expected. There were a good twenty five or thirty people there to see it! Amazing!

Even more mind blowing is the fact that this re-release of Close Encounters grossed $2.3 million over the weekend. Let that sink in for a minute— a forty year old movie grossed a fourth of what the brand new The Hitman's Bodyguard managed to pull in!

There are a few potential blockbusters looming on the movie horizon, such as It, Thor: Ragnarok and of course Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which will hopefully pull the box office out of its dismal slump.  But I ain't holdin' my breath.