Summer, to me, always meant hours at the movies. We didn’t have a lake house or a summer home; my summer home was the Avco Wilshire in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, plus a hundred other theaters within a 10-minute drive of my house.

When I read stories about how the hits are back this summer or how real family-friendly blockbusters are returning to the theaters for real this time, I just feel sad. The summer movie season has been dead for years. Starting on Memorial Day, creatively zombified movies start showing up in the theaters, and zombie ticket buyers stagger into corporate multiplexes to stare at the latest drivel Hollywood has managed to produce.

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Once in a very great while, one of these movies becomes a “hit.” The current definition of “hit” is a movie that makes a profit. If it’s a blockbuster, it may also generate organic, viral popularity, memes, and excitement. It may become a “must-see” movie. 

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was the last big, full-blown, four-quadrant summer hit. Two other recent hits include A Minecraft Movie (2025) and the Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022). Each was accompanied by a viral Gen Z-initiated, meme-inspired activity, such as throwing popcorn when Jack Black says “chicken jockey” in Minecraft or dressing up in a suit and attending a screening in a pack of “gentleminions,” as teenage boys (my own included) did for the Minions movie.

Other than that, I can’t think of a movie that made anything more than a superficial cultural impact. Giant tentpole movies designed to land like meteors instead merely glanced off the surface and bounced away into obscurity, sentenced to circulate as cheap Amazon Prime rentals for decades. 

Even movies that made buckets of cash, as Marvel’s Avengers movies did, were mostly forgotten except by superfans. 

Last summer, a series of forgettable “hits” dropped and were immediately forgotten. Did anyone see The Garfield Movie (2024)?

This summer looks to be slightly more profitable, with the highly anticipated Disney live-action Lilo & Stitch and a new entry into the Jurassic World franchise. Both these movies, predictably, look terrible and are already producing bad reviews. Crowds will still show up, however, since there is literally nothing else to see. 

And sometimes an American just wants to go to the movies, OK? It’s our constitutional right! 

But for me, the experience is more depressing each time I take my children to a new movie. The audio is excruciatingly loud, and you still can’t hear a word of dialogue. Ten thousand hours of commercials for products you don’t want. Trailers for movies you don’t want to see, and everyone is on their phones the entire time. I can hardly blame them. Instagram Reels are far more engaging than contemporary storylines.

This all tends to send me into nostalgic boomer mode. I mourn the glory days we enjoyed as children. So gather ‘round and let Grandma Peachy tell you about how in the summertime, your mother would drop you off at the theater and you would see two or even three movies back to back — and still have more to see the following weekend. Each ticket was about $4, easily affordable with your measly allowance.

This is good because there were a ton of movies you had to see, and you only had three months to finish them before school started again. Here are the top 10 movies that came out in 1984: Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Police Academy, Footloose, Romancing the Stone, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Splash. I saw every single one in a theater, and so did my siblings, all of my friends, and their parents. If you didn’t see them, you weren’t even part of the culture; you’d chosen death, irrelevance. 

And here are the top 10 movies that came out in 1985: Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rocky IV, The Color Purple, Out of Africa, Cocoon, The Jewel of the Nile, Witness, The Goonies, and Spies Like Us. Maybe you’ve heard of a few of these. These movies are all 40 years old, yet they are still culturally relevant. 

Now let’s look at the top 10 movies that came out last year. This is the best 2024 had to offer: Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2, Dune: Part 2, The Brutalist, Ghostlight, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Substance, Wicked, and A Real Pain. Yikes. I saw three of them: I took my children to the Inside Out sequel (B-) and Moana 2 (D+). I barely survived Wicked, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Oh, and I saw Furiosa on a plane. Not bad. 

I have no idea what the rest were even about, and no one ever mentioned them to me. (Dune looked like a self-important snoozefest, so I skipped it, sorry!)

Moana 2 is a perfect encapsulation of what went wrong. 2016’s Moana is a perfect movie, wonderful in all the right ways, thanks to the loving care the writers took to create a fantasy story that felt real, was actually charming, and was filled with songs that became instant classics. It was my daughter’s favorite movie for years. 

For the sequel, they took a straight-to-streaming, steaming pile of discarded story elements and shamefully forced a “movie” onto theatergoers as an authentic sequel. Only it isn’t; it’s a cynical, barely watchable piece of “Moana-themed content” that will occupy your toddler for an hour or so while you post on X in the darkened theater. I can’t remember a single song. It was even worse than Frozen 2 (2019), and that’s saying something.

Being fully American used to require that you take part in this great cultural tradition. It was part of your patriotic duty to spend a weekend afternoon or evening in a dark theater with strangers at least a few times a year. It was not just about the movie itself, but about getting the references to the movie that would live on for months. It was about being in on all the jokes late-night comedians would tell about the film for the next year. It was about being able to talk about the movies at school or work. 

As an American, you’d better be able to recite all the jokes from Caddyshack (1980), Predator (1987), Stripes (1981), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Vacation (1983) at summer camp or at your summer job lest you become a social outcast.

Even though you could rent a lot of movies at Blockbuster, going to the theater used to be fun. My theater order was always the same: a Diet Coke and a box of Junior Mints. Maybe I’d have some of my brother’s popcorn, too. After the movie, my little brother and I would recreate the jokes and scenes together all the way home. My brother and I never got along much growing up, except for those rides home after the movie, when we were suddenly best friends, bonded by how funny Indiana Jones or Eddie Murphy was. 

The main difference between movies then and now is not immediately apparent, but it is shocking once you see it. 

American blockbusters also used to share an implicit theme: Americans are awesome, especially compared to those poor losers in other places. This was the meta context that infuses all Hollywood hit movies from the beginning of the film industry until just about 15 years ago. The most beloved heroes are inevitably ultra-American, especially when they are fish out of water, picking their way through unfamiliar foreign lands. 

Think about Michael Douglas hacking through the jungles of Colombia in Romancing the Stone. Indiana Jones stuck in the jungles of India in Temple of Doom. Sylvester Stallone vs. Soviet Russia in Rocky IV. When these movies ended, you felt an incredible urge to salute the flag and kiss the ground. 

Even after a Star Wars movie, which takes place in a world where America doesn’t exist, the main characters are all so American-coded that you are instantly on their side. Han Solo is so obviously all-American, he probably played football at Galactic USC, and there is no way you will not cheer for him and his space version of a souped-up muscle car.

Monday was  Memorial Day, and we are a traditional American family, so my daughter went to see the new Lilo & Stitch Disney remake. Knowing her, she enjoyed it, since she grew up with terrible children’s movies and can’t tell the difference between unwatchable drek and a new classic. Sadly, Disney has “reimagined” this one into a sad version of its former self. In the original animated version, the orphaned sisters stay together in the end, living out the movie’s recurrent theme that “ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind.” 

In the new version, older sister Nani gives up custody of Lilo so she can go to the University of California, San Diego, and become a marine biologist. Sigh. This is not Andy heading off to college and bequeathing Buzz and Woody to a little girl in Toy Story 3 (2010). This is Nani being “reimagined” (that’s Disney for woke-ified) as a girl boss. Andy doesn’t know that his toys are sentient, and he still feels bad about abandoning them. Nani is Lilo’s mother-figure, but she has better things to do, OK?

Lilo & Stitch has already broken Memorial Day ticket sales records. Why? Again, because there is no competition.

The other big movies coming or already out this year are, of course, sequels: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Jurassic World Rebirth, 28 Years Later (a zombie movie sequel for theater zombies), Freakier Friday, Superman, Final Destination Bloodlines, and Avatar: Fire and Ash, among other random titles. Yes, they are just remaking years’ worth of films from the 90s and early 2000s, some with the original aged actors. Is anyone excited to see any of these?

I am sorry to report that there is not a single 2025 movie I plan to see. I may see the latest Wes Anderson movie, The Phoenician Scheme, when it comes to streaming (and be underwhelmed, as usual), but that’s about it. 

It’s like this because no one cares anymore. No one cares if movies are good or bad, not the studio or the audience. It’s Temu but for movies. It’s just content. Standards have fallen along with everyone’s taste. Nothing will be made that you can’t watch while scrolling TikTok. The movie theater is just one more stop on the screen-slop express, an air-conditioned restaurant that serves popcorn and candy between commercials, and that’s it.

People who still remember how good movies used to be will just keep rewatching old classics on streaming until they die. 

WHY, RELUCTANTLY, I’M SEEING THE MINECRAFT MOVIE

The secret is: this will continue until Hollywood runs out of old intellectual property, and it still has a while to go. All new movies will soon be based on video games and apps, and no one will bother with original ideas or stories.

My advice? Read a book. Better yet, write one.

Peachy Keenan is a writer and mother of five living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, Supervillains, and a forthcoming novel. She also writes for various publications, including the Los Angeles Times and for Substack at peachykeenan.com. Follow her on X @keenanpeachy.