QUESTION ASKED AND (PARTIALLY) ANSWERED: Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?

Because an industry that’s been utterly obsessed with sequels and remakes for two decades now has finally hit rock bottom?

On Sunday, Nina and I saw the reissue of the 1989 Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson that was playing at the Fort Worth Cinemark mega-multiplex. It’s not a bad movie, in spite of itself, if only because Keaton and to a lesser extent Nicholson took their characters seriously and finally buried Adam West-era bat-camp, along with the eye-popping production design and dark, noirish cinematography.

But the movie is also a study in hype, via the mammoth marketing campaign Warner Brothers assembled around the film (and in the film, via the badly shoehorned Prince songs). Future movie historians will look back at Batman as ground zero for where it all began to go wrong for a Hollywood that became far more interested in being a vertically integrated marketing machine for ancillary products such as toys, CDs and happy meals, than the product at the core of its business.

Of course, it’s a given that however bad Hollywood’s product is this year, it will only get worse going forward: “‘Ocean’s 8’ to Feature… All-Female Team of Thieves and Grifters. Have they learned nothing from Ghostbusters?”