2001 also gave us “Lord of the Rings”, “Gosford Park”, “The Royal Tenenbaums”, “Memento” and “Mullholland Drive” among others.

Hell, even 1999, considered by many the finest year in cinema since the invention of the blockbuster, didn’t have have one of the better summers. It was the “Sixth Sense”, (Which appeared in theaters at the very end of the summer), a bunch of really good but-not-mass appeal cartoons, and “The Matrix”, which came out before May.

There are movies that aren’t bad, but were “The Devil Wears Prada” or “Talladega Nights” enough to say that “No, it was a pretty good summer? I mean, maybe “Cars” is a little over-hated, but it’s definitely lower in the Pixar canon. “Mission Impossible III” was an improvement over 2, but I think it’s really hard to maintain much goodwill, and it certainly wasn’t what we needed at the time. This is like, the best Hollywood had to offer, and none of it was as good as “The Nice Guys”.

There’s no fucking way Iron Man 3 was a better movie than Star Trek Into Darkness-NONE.

Plus, you don’t even like THE GOONIES???!!!! You. Suck.

(Also, notice how she doesn’t include the godawful Ghostbusters reboot among this summer’s stinkers. Obviously a PC move)

I think the main thing is perception, like you noted. Most work in any creative medium is destined to reside in mediocrity. And the law of averages proposes that the bigger, more ambitious a project, the more things can go potentially wrong. The more I find out about what goes into production of tentpole movies, the thousands of choices, ideas, mistakes, cuts, and just plain luck involved from hundreds of craftspeople for millions of dollars, its a wonder anything gets made period, much less be a great film. The good popcorn movies will always be outweighed the bad ones. That’s just the unfortunate reality.

Still, its the perception that’s key. 2014 had plenty of stinkers; Transformers: Age of Extinction, And So It Goes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Lets Be Cops, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Expendables 3, Sin City 2, Amazing Spider-Man 2, and that abominable Jersey Boys musical from Clint Eastwood. But it never gets mentioned in articles like this for the worst. Why? Because it had Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Edge of Tomorrow. Same thing with 2015; no matter how bad Fantastic Four or Pixels or Aloha turned out, this was the year we got turned Inside Out and rode across the Fury Road to Valhalla!

All you need is a couple of great big movies to turn perception around. A couple big films you can point towards and say, “That! That was beautiful, fresh, funny, exciting, heartfelt, ambitious, thrilling, and all the other great things you want a studio blockbuster to be!”. And 2016 doesn’t have that. There were no great Pixar films, no superhero movies for the ages, no great thrillers. So every week goes by and another big not-good movie comes out, you’re bombarded with commercials, trailers, interviews, reviews about it, with nothing to get excited about in the near future, and you feel like, “Holy shit, is the worst summer ever!?” Couple that with, as you mentioned, the general cynicism felt in the news cycle and the SCORCHING heat, the disappointment that you can’t even escape to the movies for a good couple hours really makes that perception stick.

But hey, 2013(the last “worst summer ever”) turned out to be a pretty darn good year for cinema, right? 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, Before Midnight, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Wolf of Wall Street, Blue is the Warmest Color, among others. Don’t give into despair for the rest of the cinematic year! And 2017’s summer has some promising big Summer movies on paper such as Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Christopher Nolan’s WW1 epic Dunkirk, the next installment in the great Matt Reeves Planet of the Apes franchise, and the Ridley Scott Alien sequel just has to be better than Prometheus. Surely the worst is all behind us.