What’s so hard about writing a summer movie?

Who doesn’t like summer movies?

While we might enjoy the more cerebral cinema that populates the rosters of the Academy Awards, movies such as “Mad Max: Fury Road” or any Quentin Tarantino movie, it’s often the mindless summer action flicks that stick in our minds.

Not all of them, of course. “Fantastic Four” was one of the biggest box-office duds of last year.

But “Jurassic World” made approximately as much as the entire gross domestic product of Finland and Venezuela combined.

And there’s no need to wait until summer. Summer movie season is now: “Captain America: Civil War” appears in a theater near you beginning May 6.

It would seem, by now, movie producers would know what works and what doesn’t, what brings people (mostly teen-aged boys) to the theaters to watch a movie – and then come back to watch it again and again. In other words, why hasn’t Hollywood developed a surefire summer movie formula?

I could almost write one myself. For example:

Bobby and Suzy meet cute at a wedding in northern California. Suzy doesn’t know Bobby’s incredibly wealthy parents own a vineyard in Sonoma; he doesn’t know she is a robot.

They drive off from the wedding to go skinny dipping in the ocean. Within seconds, Suzy feels a tug from below and notices that an enormous avenging white shark has eaten her leg.

When she and Bobby manage to struggle to shore, she says, “Don’t worry about the leg, I have another one in the trunk.” This is how he learns that she is a robot, but is determined to love her forever anyway.

As he stares into her artificial eyes, they both are lifted into the air by prehistoric raptors who carry them off to a secret laboratory run by a mad genius who has been replicating dinosaurs with some old DNA he found. To fund the project, he has mass produced a line of perfect pekepoos that he sells online.

Bobby manages to steal a truck and rams it through the gates of the compound to escape. Suzy steals a pekepoo she names RT3000 after her mother.

The truck is lifted into the air by a power beam when Bobby and Suzy mistakenly venture into a battle between aliens shaped like giant praying mantises and a band of Texas Rangers with superpowers. Bobby manages to steal a proton jet and fly himself and Suzy to a broken-down motel on a hill.

Bobby and Suzy are worn out. They gladly pay for a room in the motel, which is run by a friendly but strange young man who can’t stop talking about his mother and how she loves her rocking chair.

As Bobby and Suzy settle into bed, they hear horrible noises rising from every room in the motel. They soon learn that the place is occupied entirely by teen vampires who can party all night because they sleep during the day.

Bobby steals a tractor. After running over some vampires (they aren’t really dead; you can’t kill a vampire with a tractor) Bobby and Suzy end up in a small town.

“What, more teenagers?” Bobby comments.

They are surrounded by athletic-looking teens with bows and arrows, hatchets and swords. The teens say they are supposed to fight one another but instead have joined forces to battle the evil despotic leaders who have abolished democracy and equality and turned their homeland into a wasteland.

“What is this terrible place?” Suzy asks.

“North Carolina,” a teen named Catnip answers her.

At this point, the movie is getting fairly long. Time to end it.

Because of global warming, the eastern half of America suddenly freezes. Bobby steals three skis (Suzy still hasn’t attached her replacement leg). They ski on glaciers until they reach sunny California and take over management of the vineyard from Bobby’s parents.

The scene fades as Bobby and Suzy feed RT3000 artisanal cheese and spelt crackers.

Writers begin developing the sequel for next summer.

This story was originally published April 28, 2016 at 3:20 PM with the headline "What’s so hard about writing a summer movie?."