The summer movie season had started off so promisingly. ''Mission: Impossible 2'' racked up $91.8 million in American theaters on the long Memorial Day weekend, fueling a record-breaking $171 million holiday and causing swoons of ecstasy to ripple through the corporate corridors of major movie studios. After that, who knew what the rest of the summer of 2000 might bring? Perhaps there would be yet another bumper crop of $100 million movies, just like last summer. Some even predicted that the hot months would see not just one, but two or even three $200 million blockbusters.
And then something happened.
The horizon darkened. The engine began to make a funny pinging sound. Slowly, silently, the air went out of the tires. And the summer movie season of 2000 began to sink into the doldrums -- at least compared with last year's.
There were very few outright financial disasters among the films released in the five weeks after Memorial Day, the biggest bomb being the animated ''Titan A.E.,'' which cost more than $85 million and is expected to bring in somewhere around a third of that, causing 20th Century Fox this week to close the Phoenix animation studio that created it. But even the movies that were opening well (''Gone in 60 Seconds,'' ''Shaft,'' ''Me, Myself and Irene'') didn't seem to be clicking with audiences with quite the intensity that movies had exhibited in the summer of 1999.
