Of all the talk about sequels underperforming at the box office this summer (“The Conjuring 2” excluded), little is said about the alarmingly consistent rejection of adult-skewing original content.

Kids may flock to “Angry Birds” (pun!) and teens love “Captain America,” but older audiences don’t seem to care much about the star-driven, moderately-budgeted dramas that once anchored the movie calendar before the superhero boom of the 2000s.

A movie like “Money Monster,” a hostage-drama starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, would be a guaranteed hit back in, say, 1996. It’s right in the wheelhouse of things like “Ransom” or “A Time to Kill.” But in 2016, Clooney and Co. will be lucky to clear $40 million in total box office.

“The Nice Guys,” an excellent buddy comedy featuring “stars” Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, will make less than $35 million in its domestic run. That’s just shameful.

Then there’s Tom Hanks, America’s former box office sweetheart. His late spring release, “A Hologram for the King,” boasts a total domestic box office of $4 million and will go down as one of the actor’s lowest grossing movies in 30 years.

You can’t necessarily pin the film’s failure solely on audience indifference. “Hologram” was only released in a bit over 500 theaters nationwide, and marketing for the film was non-existent. The film, shot back in 2014, couldn’t stick to a release date and the final product reeks of studio tinkering.

Still, how can any Tom Hanks movie make less than “The Adventures of Pluto Nash?”

You can help “A Hologram for the King” a bit by going to see it this weekend at the Hayden Discount Cinema. While it may not be in the upper echelon of the actor’s filmography by any measure, it’s an agreeable little movie anchored by an engaging and slightly unhinged Hanks performance.

Based on a Dave Eggers novel and directed by Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run,” segments of “Cloud Atlas”), Hanks stars as an American businessman who travels to Saudi Arabia in the hopes of selling a telecommunications system to the Saudi government. He’s a recently divorced, washed-up salesman, but where many actors might take a sadsack approach to the character, Hanks reacts to every convoluted story twist with prickly impatience.

Hanks is probably incapable of playing an unlikeable character, but in the case of “Hologram,” his inherent charm is the perfect contrast to the character’s sharp tongue. It’s a feat few actors can clear, and the actor who’s best at it, Bill Murray, failed miserably in last year’s similarly-themed “Rock the Kasbah” (another box office bomb).

“Hologram for the King” definitely has problems, especially in how the movie hastily wraps its loose ends in the final 20 minutes. It’s a 90-minute movie that feels like the studio forcefully removed a half-hour of material.

Still, in a summer where it’s almost impossible to see a movie without the number “2” in the title, I miss the modest, explosion-free star vehicles like “A Hologram for the King.” It earned generally better reviews (69 percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes) than many of the season’s more popular titles, and you don’t have to tolerate a single cape or CGI character. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with being middle-of-the-road agreeable.

If there’s any consolation, A-list actors who can’t book studio-backed, non-franchise dramas are flocking to more challenging small-budget films, or the things that don’t waste time pandering to kids, teenagers and whoever is excited for “Independence Day: Resurgence.” If it means we get a few weird Tom Hanks movies between now and “Toy Story 4,” then we might be all the better, so long as local theaters save a few auditoriums for them.

•••

Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.