Saturday at the Skyview Drive-in in Belleville I caught “Leatherheads,” the George Clooney football comedy that is quickly rushing out of the theaters.

“Leatherheads” is an affectionate spoof of screwball comedies like “The Front Page.” Clooney has never seemed more comfortable as an heir to the easy-going movie stardom of Clark Gable and Cary Grant. Yet the film has only made about $25 million in three weeks, roughly equal to what the no-name “Prom Night” earned in its first weekend. I think “Leatherheads” deserved a batter fate; but mainstream audiences have repeatedly shown they don’t respond to meticulous mimicry of old-time movies. Clooney also starred in “The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh’s ode to “Casablanca” that was so bad it wasn’t shown to critics and only played one theater in St. Louis, for a week. And co-star Renee Zellweger starred in “Down with Love,” a stillborn satire of the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies.

By coincidence, when I returned home from the drive-in, Turner Classic Movies was showing Martin Scorsese’s musical “New York, New York,” another throwback film that stiffed at the box office. (It didn’t help that the original cut was over four hours long.)

Off the top of my head, I can think of several movies in the past few years that tried to imitate the styles of bygone eras but didn’t resonate with present-day America: “Eight-Legged Freaks,” “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” “The Black Dahlia,” and the mock-doc “Military Intelligence.” Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez even added phony film scratches to make their “Grindhouse” look suitably cheap. It might have been wiser to spend their money on market research, to find out if anyone would pay to see a movie that was willfully flawed.

It’s not a new phenomenon. In the ’70s, there were “Bugsy Malone,” “Movie Movie” and Steven Spielberg’s “1941.” They all stiffed.

The lesson, I think, is that the public isn’t as fond of the minutia of old movies as filmmakers are. If a movie is going to mimic an old style, it better have an appeal of its own–which Spielberg figured out by the time he made “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”