IS THE SUMMER KILLING THE BIZ? "In a business in which the average cost of making and marketing a studio film is more than $100 million, the summer movies have been tailored more and more to the mindlessness often associated with the tastes of young males, still Hollywood's most loyal audience. This youth-pandering has become so relentless that it has put a crimp into one of my favorite rituals: walking through theater lobbies in the spring and looking at the posters for upcoming summer films. In some years things got so dire that I couldn't find a film I even wanted to see, let alone review. As if this tendency weren't bad enough in and of itself, it began leaking into and infecting the rest of the year. The reality is that, except for the ghettoized adult window in the fall, this dumber-is-better attitude is threatening to take over all of the major studios' output. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the summer is killing American movie culture."