Well, it’s happened, kids…the first movie of the year to break the three hundred dollar mark at the box office is none other than Iron Man.

Which, frankly, is fine by me. I mean, hey…it could’ve been wildly, wildly worse. It could’ve been Sex and the City. I probably would’ve had to shoot myself if that canard flew, but I digress. People want to see stuff blow up and stuff go fast and they want to see it on screens larger than anything that can be replicated by common man at home. But here’s where things get interesting–looking back at the historical picture:

Four films grossed more than $300 million in 2007: Spider-Man 3 ($336.5 million); Shrek the Third ($322.7 million), Transformers ($318.7 million), and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End ($309.4 million).

That’s it. Just four. We’re coming up on Month Three of the summer movie season (May-September), clearing the halfway mark in just a couple short weeks, and we’ve only got one three-hundred-million grosser? Profoundly weird, says I. Is this backlash from through-the-roof gas prices? Is this an expression of how lousy on the whole the season’s turning out so far? Maybe it’s all of those things working together, and we’re getting just a little more evidence about the collapse of the theatre industry.

But either way, we’ve still got big, laser-blasting fun in the form of Iron Man. Enjoy the trivia.

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