The reviews are in and they are not good. The remake of “Ben Hur,” opening Friday, should be the biggest flop of the summer, if not the year. The movie is registering a poor 32% on Rotten Tomatoes among critics and bloggers. The number keeps dropping, too.

The big question will be why did Paramount greenlight a remake of the classic 1959 film with director Timur Bekmambetov?

read about Leonardo DiCaprio’s charitable foundation here

Trade reviews are terrible, and the onslaught of negatives on Rotten Tomatoes and Meta critic are is on its way.

The budget is listed officially at $100 million, but $150 million seems like a more reasonable number for what’s been spent. The only thing going for it is a lack of overpaid stars.

And that may be the problem. While Jack Huston and Toby Kebbell are fine actors, they’re not big names. “Ben Hur,” if it had to be done at all, needed a “Gladiator” like Russell Crowe to drive the chariot around the box office.

But why remake this at all? Why remake most of the remakes? Let them alone on Turner or AMC. New ideas are what’s needed. Hollywood just keeps going back and back to a well no one’s interested in.

I digress. “Ben Hur” may do well overseas, where no one will be the wiser. But in the U.S., unless people are desperate for air conditioning, it sounds like trouble is coming.

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The revelations about actor-writer-director Nate Parker and his “Birth of a Nation” pose dilemmas unseen before in the film biz.

For one, how does Fox Searchlight release the film? Do they release it all? Can they claim fraud of some kind to recoup the millions they paid or have laid out?

And does the Toronto Film Festival still show the movie? It seems inconceivable that “Birth of a Nation” could be featured as a gala or special presentation with press involvement.

The revelations today from Variety that Parker’s 1999 rape accuser killed herself in 2012 more or less put an end to marketing “Birth of a Nation.” What’s worse is, I’m told when Variety (and perhaps Deadline also) interviewed Parker, they didn’t know the young woman was dead, and Parker didn’t volunteer the information.

That seems most egregious of all. In Ramin Setoodeh’s original Variety piece, he noted that Parker brought along his 6 year old daughter to the interview. For heaven’s sake, what purpose was that supposed to serve?

What’s mind blowing is that Parker’s story hadn’t come out in all the time he’d been acting. It’s been a decade since “The Great Debaters” brought him into the public eye. No one from Penn State raised their hand when Parker first started becoming famous, to mention the rape trial. And since Sundance, until now, there’s been no talk of this.

Even worse, I guess, for Fox Searchlight and the movie’s financiers will be questions of who knew what when? Because suddenly what seemed like a golden film headed for massive accolades, “Birth of a Nation” is headed into uncharted waters.

Here’s an update on the Nate Parker story. Variety is reporting that the young woman who Parker and his college friends were accused of assaulting in 1999 committed suicide in 2012. It’s good reporting and it’s a tragic story for everyone.

Parker was acquitted in 2001, his friend (and co-writer of “The Birth of a Nation”) was found guilty but that was overturned on appeal. The young woman tried to commit suicide twice after the trial. Now it turns out via her brother that she succeeded at killing herself in 2012. She left behind a child.

I questioned why all this came up the other day. It’s obvious that after so many years it was dug up to kill the Oscar campaign and release of “Birth of a Nation.” That’s a separate subject.

But this new piece of information will likely do in “Birth of a Nation.” What a shame for everyone because the movie is obviously important. The tragedy of the woman’s death, the brother’s interview, the fact that she left a child– this seems insurmountable to deal with in real life terms, forget the Academy Awards. Can the movie still be judged on its own? And how would anyone do publicity?

This must come as a shock on the movie side to everyone involved. It doesn’t help that none of this was addressed when Variety and Deadline did their original stories. Didn’t they know? (I think they did.)

to be continued…