So which of the big blockbusters did you catch this summer? Ghostbusters? Star Trek Beyond? The BFG? None of the above? If it’s the latter you’re not the only one. This would appear to have been a pretty poor summer for the Hollywood. Roughly a billion dollar loss-making summer in fact.

That’s what Bloomsberg has been reporting, using figures from the movie industry website The Numbers. Estimated losses this summer come in at $915.6m (the best part of £700bn in sterling), thanks to big losses on films like Star Trek Beyond, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and outright winner in the losing stakes Ben-Hur, which is projected to be down $120m.

This is a deficit significantly up from last year’s which came in at $546.3m (£411m) and suggests something is wrong with the current Hollywood model of big budgets, sequelitis and rebooting pre-existing film, TV and comic book properties.

Schadenfreude, you might think. That’s what you get for giving the audience big-budget big-gamble “products” that sacrifice complexity, narrative coherence and, often, characterisation for empty spectacle and bland drama designed expressly not to offend rather than to genuinely engage.

That’s what you get for cultivating a fanboy audience who react like spoilt nasty brats when someone dares tamper with their childish tastes in a way they don’t approve of (see the frankly toxic racist and sexist online trolling that dogged the all-female Ghostbusters reboot). That’s what you get for beating a formula to death (superheroes, superheroes and more superheroes).

Time for a few caveats though. Firstly, some of these figures have been disputed by the studios themselves. Studio insiders have suggested that Ben-Hur’s losses will be closer to $75m (£56.4m). The final box office returns won’t be known until the film fully circles the globe (Ben-Hur has just opened in the UK after all). Estimates are, in the end, just estimates.

If the $75m deficit proves correct that means that Paramount, the film studio behind Ben-Hur, will be out around $13m (or less than £10m) because of the way studios spread the risk via multiple investors.

There have been notable successes too, most notably Finding Dory. Oh, and Captain America: Civil War (which suggests that there isn’t quite as much superhero fatigue as you might think). Even the much slated Suicide Squad has done well at the box office. Bad reviews are not necessarily a problem. (Somewhere in this building our own Alison Rowat is laughing hysterically at the very idea.)

On top of that there are some encouraging numbers in amongst the misery. The cliché is that the Hollywood model has only two gears: the blockbuster and the Oscar-baiting prestige picture. But there are still mid-level genre films punching above their weight. Specifically the American horror movie.

Dollar for dollar, horror movie Lights Out, made for a very modest $4.9m (£3.69m) has been the most successful film of the summer, while Don’t Breathe (costing less than $10m), which has just opened here, is top of the box office in the US at the moment.

It would be something if Hollywood took these successes as a reason for widening the film ecology, varying the level of investment and backing smaller, perhaps even more adventurous films. The reality, though, will be Lights Out II, coming to a cinema near you next summer.