A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : FILM REALITY : Zipping Into Summer (<i> OK, OK,</i> Sauntering)

The summer movie season may have opened last weekend without a bang, but it was an unusual lineup for a Memorial Day start-up, the experts said.

“It may seem as though things got off a little slowly,” said John Krier of Exhibitor Relations Co., “but we haven’t had a Memorial Day opening like this in years. The results were fragmented and there were no sequels. No one’s getting alarmed yet.”

“This was the first Memorial Day in 10 years where there hasn’t been a major sequel . . . not a single Roman numeral,” said Art Murphy, the longtime industry analyst for the trade paper Daily Variety. “It was like an election without an incumbent running.”

Of the films that opened--including “Backdraft,” “Hudson Hawk,” “Thelma & Louise” and “Only the Lonely”--”Backdraft” topped the box-office winners, with $15.7 million in ticket sales.

One exhibitor described the Memorial Day weekend results as “good, but nothing fabulous. ‘Hudson Hawk’ was the real letdown and ‘Thelma & Louise’ showed surprising vitality.”

“The first weekend was encouraging given how poorly business has been performing the last six to eight weeks,” said Philip Garfinkle, the senior vice president of Entertainment Data Inc.

Moviegoing in the United States has been slow since the Easter holiday week; only “FX2” and “What About Bob?” have had any impact. But the overall box-office gross is slightly ahead of this time last year because of such holdover 1990 hits as “Home Alone” and “Dances With Wolves,” plus the success of this year’s “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Sleeping With the Enemy.”

Murphy believes that business this weekend and next will fall off slightly. “Then it will kick off,” he said, as the major studios release their big guns: “City Slickers,” “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” “The Rocketeer,” “Naked Gun 2 1/2” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” are due in the next several weeks.