Remember those heady days when Al Gore won an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”? The climate change movie caught the zeitgeist of the moment in 2006. I gave it a rave review which the producers used on the DVD box. The documentary made $25 million domestically and the same amount abroad.

But sequels, especially with similar titles, can be a problem. So “An Inconvenient Sequel” has been a box office dud so far. After 17 days in release, Gore’s follow up has made just $2 million at the box office. Compare that with $5 million for the original in the same time frame. The sequel has turned out to be very inconvenient at least financially.

Times have changed since the first movie. Climate change is still an urgent issue. But Gore perhaps ran into more pressing problems playing out on CNN and other real news networks– Neo Nazis, North Korea, and a crazy president who doesn’t believe in any of Gore’s — and scientists’– theories.

Not only that: while Gore’s heart is in the right place, his hyperbole can hurt him. A mild summer in the Northeast, snow in usually hot places, haven’t helped. People don’t understand that ‘climate change’ means exactly that. Instead, they relate to the term ‘global warming.’ If it’s not 100 degrees outside, the whole thing seems far away.

Climate change movies are better suited to other platforms rather than the box office– HBO, Showtime, Amazon, Netflix. Last fall, Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Before the Flood” had a very limited theatrical release, made zilch, and was released more effectively for free on line and on National Geographic Channel. At the box office, fossil fuels can’t compete with superheroes and genius apes.

The very very bad summer box office continues to be a horror.

To cap it off, cheap horror film “Annabelle: Creation” opened with $15 million from Thursday previews ($4m) and Friday night tickets. It’s on its way to a $35 million opening weekend and the number 1 position.

So much for any hope of a good movie summer. Exceptions were “Wonder Woman,” “Spider Man,” and “Dunkirk.” “Baby Driver” has also done well. But the list of failures is long. “Detroit” was the biggest disappointment of the bunch. Critics loved Kathryn Bigelow’s dark account of the summer of 1967, but audiences were not interested. It was released at the wrong time of year if Annapurna Pictures wanted the serious, awards crowd. They were away in the Hamptons, etc.

Sony, which had the “Spider Man” success and “Baby Driver,” is now sitting on two lemons– “The Dark Tower” and “The Emoji Movie.” As for the latter, I direct them to the Undisputed Truth, circa 1971– “Smiling Faces, sometimes they don’t tell the truth.”

So where is everyone? “Dunkirk” drew out the only good crowd of the summer so far. But that crowd seems to be mostly at home waiting for “Game of Thrones” and worrying about Trump declaring war by accident on Lichtenstein. And maybe Roy Lichtenstein, if Fox & Friends says he’s their president.

Naomi Watts is so good in “The Glass Castle,” along with Brie Larson, a bunch of talented kids and most especially Woody Harrelson. At last night’s premiere for Dustin Daniel Cretton’s excellent adaptation of Jeannette Walls’s best selling memoir, Naomi had a lot of things to discuss– this movie, her series “Gypsy,” and “Twin Peaks,” where she’s been playing a suburban Lady MacBeth who knows more than she’s letting on. (Naomi as always is MVP of the movie and TV world.)

So I asked Naomi about “Twin Peaks,” which readers here know I hate watch with the hope that someday something will happen.

“Is it good? I’m sure it’s good. But I haven’t watched it yet,” Naomi told me. I explained where we were and what was going on. She liked the Lady MacBeth reference. “Do you want to know what’s going to happen?” she said, teasing me. “I’m not going to tell you. We can’t say anything.”

In “The Glass Castle,” Naomi plays Jeannette Walls’s real life mother, Rosemary. You know that Jeannette was a famous New York gossip columnist at New York Magazine. She was glamorous and beautiful and smart. (I succeeded her at the Intelligencer column in 1994.) No one knew during her long, successful run that she had a secret: her parents, dreamers who lived off the grid and in poverty, were squatters in a New York tenement. Jeannette and her siblings had been raised in squalid conditions with a lot of abuse and neglect. When her dad died in 1994, Jeannette left the gossip trade and wrote her story. It became a bestseller.

Cretton directed Oscar winner Brie Larson in “Short Term 12,” and here Brie plays Jeannette as an adult, taking over from two exceptional younger actresses– Chandler Head and Ella Anderson. Woody Harrelson is Rex, Jeannette’s father, who’s sort of a cross between Viggo Mortensen in “Captain Fantastic” and Harrison Ford in “The Mosquito Coast.” All the actors are terrific, with Harrelson maybe giving the most surprising performance. Larson continues to astound.

Among the guests last night: director Simon Curtis, who’s got “Goodbye Christopher Robin” coming this fall from Fox Searchlight. He’s married Elizabeth McGovern, aka Lady Cora Grantham. What does he know about the “Downton Abbey” movie? “As usual, almost nothing,” he said with a chuckle. “I guess it will happen next year.” Also on hand: my old pal Josh Lucas, who raking it in doing voice overs for hardware store commercials. He’ll be on Broadway this fall in “The Parisian Woman” with Uma Thurman.

As for “The Glass Castle,” it’s not perfect, but it’s important and moving. We look at people around us thinking, they’ve got it made. That’s what we all used to think about Jeannette. I mean, we thought she was Miss America. To see what’s she and her siblings lived through, and what they accomplished coming out of it, it’s an amazing story. The journey to serenity is never easy.