Horrible Bosses has a cast of legit A-listers, but it lets Charlie Day (l), Jason Sudeikis and Jason Bateman shine.

In a column on the new sports and pop culture website Grantland last week, Bill Simmons, the writer who has done more to bring those two now interconnected streams together than anyone not named Michael Jordan — I know what you’re thinking but no, I’m not going to give Khloe Kardashian or Lamar Odom any credit — argued that the quality of this summer’s Hollywood films was probably the worst ever.

Now, I know there have been some complaints, but the worst ever? That seems extreme. In order to verify, Reeltalk went to Rotten Tomatoes and averaged out the top critics’ scores for every movie released since Fast Five, and compared the final tally to that of the top earners from the past couple of summers. By no means does this qualify as a scientific assessment of this year’s summer movie crop, but somehow Rotten Tomatoes has become the best aggregator of critical opinion out there, so it’s the best we’ve got.

All in all, the top critics found that movies released this summer averaged out to a score of 43.5 per cent. So yes, it’s been bad. But 2010 actually has us beat. Last year’s summer fare managed to pull in an astonishingly dismal average rating of 41.4 per cent, and that’s not including the Ashton Kutcher vehicle Killers, which I left out because it received a somewhat unfair zero-per-cent score.

So there you go 2011, we’ve got 2010 beat. Rejoice!

Of course, 2009 kicked our asses with an average score of 62 per cent, but the only reason Reel Talk spent an hour and a half typing Rotten Tomatoes scores into a calculator we were surprised to find out we owned was to prove that there has, at some point, been a worse year than 2011. We weren’t aiming high, but we proved Bill Simmons wrong. Take that Bill!

But there does seem to be a perception that 2011 has been an awful year for movies, and with Zookeeper opening this weekend that opinion’s likely only going to become more entrenched. Despite its lower average score, the summer of 2010 did give us Inception, a genuinely original blockbuster, and Toy Story 3, which ranks alongside Blade 2 and The Godfather Part 2 as one of the best sequels of all time.

This year’s given us nothing but a never-ending series of remakes, adaptations and sequels. And now Zookeeper, which looks like nothing more than Night at the Museum in a zoo. Or possibly a sequel to Hitch where the writers simply replaced Will Smith’s smooth-talking ladies man with a giraffe. Either way, Kevin James clearly needed the help, and I clearly need to stop wasting time writing about Zookeeper. If you’re the type of person who wants to see James in a zoo, you’re going to be rewarded. If the Rotten Tomatoes top critics reviewed you, they’d say you were the worst.

What’s odd about this year is that other than The Hangover 2, it’s been a great summer for comedies. Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher have combined to establish R-rated female driven comedies as being financially viable and the advanced buzz on Horrible Bosses has been surprisingly good.

It’s also a movie that’s marketed itself completely differently than you’d expect. Most movies that featured Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell and Kevin Spacey would push them hard in marketing materials, but whoever’s behind Horrible Bosses has let the comedy speak for itself instead. They’ve pushed Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day and Jason Bateman front and centre, which suggests they know they’ve got a good movie on their hands and will make their money off of solid word-of-mouth instead of one big opening weekend payday. That doesn’t mean it’s a good movie, but if nothing else it means the marketing people have balls.

Elsewhere, Transformers: Dark of the Moon made a shit-ton of money. It’s also led to a shit-ton of Shia LaBeouf articles that make him come across like a passive-aggressive douchebag. He apparently went to “the university of Michael Bay,” and may God help us all if that ever becomes a real thing.

Larry Crowne didn’t make much money, proving once and for all that fighting robots are more of a draw than middle-aged men on motorcycles.