Early tracking numbers suggest that this summer movie season already sucks the big one

With so many Marmaduke– and somewhat-less-than-Marmaduke-class pictures coming out this summer, you would think that the theater box office would be alive with the sound of ringing cash registers, even though no one uses ringing cash registers anymore. But alas, as Deadline points out, this seems destined to be the summer of suck: Early box-office tracking (which measures audience interest and predicts eventual grosses) on would-be tentpole films like Tom Cruise’s Knight And Day and the Josh Brolin-starring comic-book adaptation Jonah Hex is faring poorly. How poorly? As poorly as the preliminary tracking was on the recent Ashton Kutcher/Katherine Heigl spy comedy Killers, which was received with just as much gushing indifference as predicted. If Knight And Day and Jonah Hex follow suit, they’ll join the quickly disappearing ranks of pretty much every other mega-hyped, monster-budgeted films in what’s turning out to be one of the least-exciting summer movie seasons in recent memory. But hey, at least we still have Inception, right?