(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you're old enough to attend an R-rated movie without a chaperone, you probably sympathize with Esquire's assessment of this past summer. After sitting through "one crappy blockbuster after another," a critic for the magazine wondered if "Hollywood had it in for us."

Indeed, the summer movie season was notable for the amount of junk that studios shoveled into multiplexes. But the orgy of digital dinosaurs, videogame characters, talking apes, and raging mummies also made Hollywood studios an enormous amount of money.

By almost every financial yardstick, this was a fantastic summer. Attendance was up 6% over last year, and the studios scored four of the biggest opening weekends in history: Pearl Harbor, Planet of the Apes, The Mummy Returns, and Rush Hour 2. In all, the seven major studios--led by Universal, which grossed $518 million--pulled in $3 billion domestically, tying the biggest gross ever. (Toss in another $7.7 billion once the movies open worldwide and wind their way through television and video.) Although Hollywood's profits should be about flat over last year--not bad for an economic downturn--profit margins are up 2%, according to tracking firm Kagan World Media.

All of this is fabulous news for the studios, which take in 40% of their revenues during the summer season. But it's pretty dismal for moviegoers. After almost a century in the business, Hollywood has finally unlocked the formula for a successful summer: Forget expensive stars, rely on sequels of well-worn franchises, take no chances, and most of all remember your audience--12- to 17-year-olds on summer break. Unfortunately, every element of this model contributes to horrible movies.

What a departure from just a few years ago, when studios rolled out some of their big Oscar contenders during the summer--movies like Saving Private Ryan and Forrest Gump, which were aimed at grownups and propelled by word of mouth. It's even a change from the summer before last, which featured the Academy Award-winning Gladiator as well as movies starring Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible 2), Mel Gibson (The Patriot), and Jim Carrey (Me, Myself & Irene). Despite the plaudits these films received (Okay, not Jim Carrey's), the summer of 2000 was widely regarded as a financial disaster. Films cannibalized one another, and revenue dropped for the first time in four years.

This year it didn't matter if Meg Ryan, Tea Leoni, or your neighbor Phyllis starred in Jurassic Park III. The most impressive acting feat came from a computer-generated Spinosauras that ingests and excretes a cordless telephone at key moments in the film. (Remember those 12- to 17-year-olds!) The Fast and the Furious, a modest trifle, drew $40 million in its opening weekend and was notable for its souped-up cars and its no-name cast. That's a model the studios can love; they don't have to pony up the gargantuan salaries that Hollywood's biggest stars command--more than $20 million, or a piece of the studio's gross that can reach 20%.

As if to prove the new rule of summer in Hollywood, the one star project, which boasted heavies (not literally) Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones, proved relatively tame. America's Sweethearts grossed a disappointing $30 million in its opening weekend. No, you didn't misread the figure. A $30 million opening weekend was chump change this summer.

This was the year that Hollywood became obsessed with the huge opening weekend. Why? First, a word about multiplexes: From 1995 to 2000, the number of movie screens in the U.S. rose from 27,843 to 36,264. The proliferation of theaters has been horrible for the owners (many are in bankruptcy) but a boon for studios. Studios are eager to draw crowds into theaters early because their guaranteed take shrinks as a movie ages--from as high as 70% of the total gross to as low as 30% in the seventh week of release. Planet of the Apes, for example, opened on 3,500 screens in its first weekend in order to get a big pop quickly. "Every city is over-plexed right now," says Russell Schwartz, president of theatrical marketing for New Line Cinema, which, like FORTUNE, is owned by AOL Time Warner. "So you might as well just be everywhere you can and make money on opening weekend."

The importance of the opening weekend changes Hollywood's game in a couple of major ways. It has all but eliminated the sleeper hit, a movie that builds slowly, propelled by word of mouth. In July 1998, There's Something About Mary opened on 2,186 screens, pulling in a mere $13 million. But the movie hovered in the top ten for seven weeks and finally topped the charts after Labor Day. Its final domestic haul was $176 million. Compare that with the model New Line used to roll out Rush Hour 2: It opened on 3,118 screens in August and made $67 million--a little less than one-third of the domestic gross on its first weekend. The initial marketing blitz becomes vital. (The average cost of promoting a movie has risen 54%, to $27 million, over the past five years.) There's just one movie this summer that didn't experience a decline in its second weekend of wide release--Shrek.

Studio executives have made it easier for themselves to get this opening pop. They've all but eliminated games of chicken--rival studios scheduling high-profile releases on the same weekend, each in hopes that the other flinches or that both films fare well. (Example: Warner Bros. and Sony unveiled would-be blockbusters The Perfect Storm and The Patriot on the same week last June, targeting the same audience.) "If you own your weekend, you can be somewhat rational about how you approach your marketing budget," says Schwartz. "If we put Rush Hour 2 up against Planet of the Apes [which had opened the previous weekend], it just would have gotten crazy." New Line noticed early in the summer that its Rush Hour 2 would be opening the same weekend as Paramount's Rat Race, so its executives called Paramount to discuss the situation. (A Paramount spokeswoman disputes this account.) Regardless, Rat Race opened two weeks later than originally scheduled.

The gentleman's agreements have allowed studios to share the wealth. From the beginning of June until the second week in August, there was a new No. 1 movie each weekend. After the opening extravaganza, audiences moved on. That is the reason the summer's movies suffered such astounding drop-offs during their second weekends--an average of 43%, according to A.C. Nielsen EDI.

Okay, okay, let's get to the important stuff: Will there ever again be a summer movie that you'll want to see? Not in the near future. The studios are cueing up some pretty insipid fare for next summer, including the obvious sequels (Men in Black II, Stuart Little 2, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Spy Kids 2, and Red Dragon, Anthony Hopkins' third Hannibal Lecter vehicle), as well as cartoon offerings (Scooby-Doo and Powerpuff Girls) and superhero fluff (Spider-Man and Blade 2).

Hollywood executives admit that they aren't thrilled about the new summer formula. They love the money but still like to think of themselves as artists and auteurs, working in a place where it's a lot cooler to break new ground than to recycle old franchises. "These are not the kinds of films that get your artistic fires going," says one studio executive. "But they pay a lot of bills, keep jobs, and make corporate parents happy." If only audiences felt the same way.

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