Hollywood studios lament summer of plummeting cinema receipts

After a record summer in 2013, box-office receipts for the 2014 peak moviegoing season have fallen by more than 15 percent. If it were any time other than summer, this would not be cause for alarm.

But the period defined in Hollywood as the 18 weeks between the first Friday in May and Labor Day (the first Monday in September) is when the studios typically make 40 percent of their annual revenues.

There has been an overall big decline, with the first eight months of 2014 more than $400 million behind the same period in 2013, according to Rentrak, which analyses box-office data.