This weekend sees the release of Suicide Squad, what many had hoped to be the last great hope for an otherwise peculiarly dodgy summer of blockbusters.
However, with the critical reaction being so negative that fans called for aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes to be taken down - despite the fact that it's owned by Warner Bros., the same company behind the movie that's being put on blast - it's clear that it will not be the saviour many had hoped it to be.
It is a trend that has been worryingly steady in it's appearance since Warners dropped Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice back in March, which went on to relatively decent box office, but also staggeringly bad reviews.
A quick look back to the summer of 2015 shows a relative cornucopia: Mad Max Fury Road, Furious 7, Inside Out, Cinderella, Ant-Man, San Andreas, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Jurassic World and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation all faired fairly to extremely well with critics and cinema-goers alike.
Ditto the summer of 2014: Guardians Of The Galaxy, Maleficent, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, Godzilla, The Lego Movie, How To Train Your Dragon 2, Lucy, 22 Jump Street and Edge Of Tomorrow all did a bang-up job of pleasing the masses.
You can go back year on year and find more than a handful of goodies in every summer, but 2016 has been something of a drought.
Outside of Disney (The Jungle Book), Marvel (Captain America: Civil War) and Pixar (Finding Dory), there's been very little in the past few months that has warranted much attention.
X-Men: Apocalypse managed to bank just over half a billion, which still puts it about $200 million short of its predecessor X-Men: Days Of Future Past, while its Rotten Tomatoes score of 48% puts it below the series most derided entry X-Men: The Last Stand.
Independence Day: Resurgence, despite the inflation of ticket prices and the additional ticket costs of IMAX and 3D, is going to make less than half of what the original movie did two decades ago, and again, reviews have been unkind.
Spielberg's The BFG is lined up to be potentially the biggest flop of his career, the movie having made barely $110 million of it's $140 million production budget back so far. Which brings up another big issue of summer's blockbusters: inexplicable price-tags.
The all-female reboot of Ghostbusters has currently banked $163 million around the world, which is decent for a comedy, until you take into account that it somehow cost $144 million to produce.
Alice Through The Looking Glass is approaching $300 million at the global box office - well shy of the original's billion dollar haul. However, before even taking promotional costs into consideration, the movie cost $170 million to make. The Huntsmen: Winter's War cost $110 million, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows cost $135 million, The Legend Of Tarzan cost $180 million, Star Trek Beyond cost $185 million - none of them were runaway hits that warranted those kinds of budgets.
Most animated movies also managed to falter, which is practically unheard of: Kung Fu Panda 3 made over $100 million less than the two previous movies in the series, The Angry Birds Movie managed to make a profit but scored a paltry 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is practically a modern classic compared to Ice Age: Collision Course's 12% score, a movie which is so far making barely a quarter of what past installments in the franchise have.
If anything, this year has proved that taking a punt on low-budget thrillers is more likely to pay off: The Shallows ($69 million and counting on a $17 million budget), The Purge: Election Year ($96m/$10m), 10 Cloverfield Lane ($108m/$15m) and The Conjuring 2 ($315m/$40m) have all proved to be a solid return on the initial investment.
It's something that paid off handsomely for Deadpool when it was released back in February; the $58 million budget raked in $782 million in return. As more and more blockbusters keep throwing money at the screen in bigger and louder attempts to cinematically destroy the world's most beloved landmarks, it's clear that the real fatigue we're experiencing is in the unrelatable mass-destruction they're showing us.
When it comes to blockbusters, it's now very apparent that bigger isn't always better.
