Every summer, it is a virtual certainty that there will be one movie of the “everyone thought it would suck well before it came out and it ended up sucking as expected, but people went to see it anyway” variety. We got “Terminator 3” in 2003, 2004 thrust “Van Helsing” onto the American public, and 2005 was the proud purveyor of that black hole of comic book adaptations, “Fantastic Four.”

This was a film with a predictable plot, half-assed storytelling and wooden acting that annihilated the previous benchmark set by Hayden Christiansen in the “Star Wars” prequels. It probably didn’t help that these flaws were further highlighted by the release of the far superior “Batman Begins” less than a month earlier. Yet somehow, “Fantastic Four” managed to swindle $329.5 million worldwide in box office receipts. Of that, $154.7 million came from the good ol’ US of A, though a chunk of the revenue can probably be attributed to horny males desperate to see Jessica Alba in the latest installment of her never-ending string of performances where the acting is poor — but she’s still hot.

Making a failure joke by playing on the movie’s double-F initials is like shooting fish in a barrel. So with regards to the tentative sequel (and to pay homage to The Thing): Clobber that idea.