The summer movie box office could be screwed

Last weekend, audiences watched Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt yuk it up in the meh movie “The Fall Guy.”

But the crowd, such as it was, looked nothing like the ticket buyers of nearly a year ago when the same A-list duo was part of the cinematic phenomenon known as #Barbenheimer.

Remember those three surreal days when the masses, lemming-like, donned pink skirts and roller skates (and, for a sprinkle of nerds, brown fedoras) and packed theaters to capacity to see films about an old doll and a dead physicist?

Domestically, that pair of polar opposites “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” grossed a combined $246 million on their opening weekend in July 2023.

They went on to do $2.4 billion in business worldwide.

Staggering.

That organic explosion of public enthusiasm was a vital life preserver for the movie industry at the time.

Like the films or not — I personally enjoyed the #enheimer half — they were were lucrative must-sees for everybody.

Whelp, nine months later, the itsy bitsy “Fall Guy,” the action-comedy starring Blunt and Gosling, grossed a meager $28 million.

“Must-see!” has become “Maybe stream?”

Barely a firecracker, and far from the momentous kick-off to summer that hobbling Hollywood was hoping for, “Fall” was the first big miss of a season with a worrying lack of sure things on the horizon.

Strange to say that about a lineup that includes a Marvel movie, “Mad Max” and Will Smith, but, hey, Harry Hamlin has a cooking show now. Up is down, down is up.

The best shot at boffo success is “Deadpool & Wolverine” (July 26), the third standalone movie for Ryan Reynolds’ curse-spewing anti-hero and the first to bring Hugh Jackman’s X-Man into the overgrown, barely tolerable Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But Logan is returning to a changed world.

Not long ago, the media was still insisting that superhero films were the only flicks we’d get to watch for the next several hundred years. At the very least.

Not so fast.

The once ironclad genre has hit a major snag with megaflops such as Marvel’s “Eternals,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels.” DC’s “The Flash,” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and “Black Adam” all tanked, too.

So, Disney execs will be sacrificing their first-borns in hopes that “Deadpool” lifts them out of their capes-and-Spandex rut in July.

And it might.

Reynolds and Jackman are big, likable stars.

But its limiting R rating and six years of dead air since the last ‘pool picture don’t help matters.

Then there’s a pair of big-name science-fiction films that desperately crave to be the next “Dune: Part Two”: the excellent “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” now in theaters, and virtuoso George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (May 24), starring Anya Taylor-Joy.

Best of luck.

Too bad neither of them star Timothee Chalamet or Zendaya.

Meanwhile, all eyes are on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, who lately is about as welcome in Hollywood as Prince Harry is at Buckingham Palace.

Back in 2020, “Bad Boys for Life,” starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, grossed $426 million worldwide — stellar numbers for a cop comedy.

Then Will “Get my wife’s name out of your f–king mouth” Smith decided to assault Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars.

Mr. “Independence Day” has been a pariah ever since.

He tried to make a comeback in 2022 with Apple’s Civil War-era prestige picture “Emancipation,” but it was poorly received and nobody watched it.

Next month, Smith will once again attempt to recover with “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” (June 7), which I bet will be a lot of fun despite his idiotic on-camera attack.

My question: Can Will Smith still deliver a smash — or just a smack?