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The Dark Tower is pleasingly short, at one hour and thirty five minutes, including credits, not including rampant trailers. I have nothing against the film - far from it! - but it's nice to get a nice short genre release after sitting through one summer blockbuster after the other that runs an unholy span of well over two hours (Apes, Valerian, Wonder Woman, Pirates, and on and on); when it comes to length, they all envy the Transformers series, which at least fills its copious running time with pleasing shots of machine-gun toting robots screaming slang English. Since the average duration of science fiction in summer 2017 exceeds even that of your typical Oscar contender, I'm now eagerly waiting the fall just so I won't have to sit through so much length.

Now, let me get something else out of the way: as every serious box office prognosticator knows, the last August not to claim a single $100 million-grossing film to its name was all the way back in 2000. A few Augusts have come close since, often teasingly - 2005, when The 40-Year-Old Virgin ultimately made it there, or 2015, when Fantastic Four disappointed, but Straight Outta Compton then blind-sided all and more than passed the milestone.

August 2016 was Suicide Squad country, so forget that, but it looks to me like 2017 may have the best chance in years for an August clear of a single $100 million movie. Looking at my forecast, you would presume that Detroit has the best chance, but an interesting tidbit is that Detroit is, legally speaking, actually a July film (it opened in limited release last week, so it's off the rolls). That really just leaves Annabelle 2 and The Dark Tower for me to contend with in my 16-year-long quest. En garde, films.

Anyway, that a Dark Tower film has finally been made is a big step in the renaissance of King's works on both film and television, with It on the way, and a King series in stages of casting. I find this agreeable. Fans of the material will attend in sufficient numbers for the film's box office to be respectable, even if it's got a 50-50 chance of losing out to Detroit for the weekend, and an even bigger chance of helping me break that August streak.

Remember this, The Dark Tower: I forecast Augusts with my heart.

Opening weekend: $30 million / Total gross: $68 million

4. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature (August 11th)
The gang of motley cartoon squirrels, mice, and pugs are back in our lives again, continuing on their endless quest for life-sustaining nutrition. They are led once more by Will Arnett, who has found himself a star of the Lego films, and must by now be a lot of people's favorite Batman (not a bad call). Also starring my friend's favorite actress, Katherine Heigl, The Nut Job 2 has assembled for its voice army the kind of impressive cast of character actors I often see in the credits of CGI monstrosities (I mean that in a good way) - among them Jackie Chan, Bobby Moynihan, Gabriel Iglesias, Peter Stormare, and Maya Rudolph, who was excessively chipper as the permanent smile Emoji just last week.

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