The summer box office is having its best season since before the pandemic — and the first real hits weren’t the franchise machines, they were two cheap horror movies made by guys who started on YouTube. Naturally, the industry is busy reading the wrong signs: mine Reddit, buy a graphic novel, staff up a division. Rob Long has seen this con before — he knows a successful project that was a script disguised as a self-published graphic novel with a fan base of five. The right sign is simpler, and it comes by way of a high school basketball coach and a friend who survived a stroke: We didn’t lose the ability to make a fun summer movie. We lost the feeling. And the feeling is the part worth getting back.

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