AP reporter Dave Germain is reporting that the 2006 box-office picture is better than last year’s because the movies aren’t as sucky. “[The] studios avoided a repeat of their stinker-of-the-week performance of 2005,” he writes, “when seemingly every Friday brought a big new movie that audiences stayed away from [like] the action bombs Stealth and The Island, the comedies The Honeymooners, Rebound and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, the historical epic Kingdom of Heaven and the remakes House of Wax and The Bad News Bears.” Maybe…but it’s worth repeating the view held in some corners and salons that if the “director’s cut” of Ridley Scott‘s Kingdom of Heaven (i.e., the one currently in DVD stores) opened instead of the truncated version that Fox put into theatres, the Average Joe turn-off factor would have been much lower, if not eliminated altogether.