Have you noticed the onslaught of articles recently about Hollywood’s lousy summer?

Movies Have Worst Summer Since 1997
Hollywood’s Horrid Summer

The general consensus, which I agree with, is that there’s too many reboots, too many sequels, too many movies based on existing properties (toys, board games, etc.) and not enough original ideas. To back that up, there’s this article from earlier in the summer noting how much better things were 30 years ago, when the summer of 1984 included such classics as:

• Ghostbusters
• The Natural
• 16 Candles
• Revenge of the Nerds
• The Karate Kid
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Clearly there’s a dearth of new ideas in Hollywood in 2014, and the movie-going public is making a loud statement by staying home.

But there’s another correlation that has mostly flown under the radar. One of the biggest players in summer movies punted this year. Just about a year ago Pixar announced that the previously-scheduled summer 2014 film The Good Dinosaur was going to be delayed.

Even in an off-year (2011’s Cars 2 was pretty unpopular but still made ~$200 million in domestic theaters) Pixar drives a significant amount of traffic to the movies. But in 2014, for the first time since 2005, there was no Pixar summer film, and the box office returns show it.

If the Good Dinosaur had been able to keep its schedule maybe this hullaballoo about “worst summer since…” would be a non-event. On the bright side, summer 2015’s release of Inside Out is looking like a real winner*.

* Full disclosure: I work at Pixar and would very much like to see Inside Out turn out to be a winner.