Accdg. to
BoxOfficeMojo, the biggest hits of Summer '82 were:
1) ET - $359M
2) An Officer & a Gentleman - $129M
3) Rocky III - $124M
4) Porky's - $105M
5) Star Trek II:tWoK - $78M
6) Poltergeist - $76M
It was '82: There was just too much competition.
It wasn't the "genre" that flopped, it was just the more memorable entries that year:
Blade Runner was too obscure, Road Warrior was too out there (and had funny accents), The Thing was too icky, Conan was too pretentious and R-rated for the kids who wanted to see it, NIMH was just starting to get by on word of mouth (but this was the point in the 80's where animation was dying in a Care Bears ghetto), Dark Crystal wasn't till Christmas, Annie was such a misfire that the studio ended up promoting it as "the Carol Burnett movie", and Tron had hyped itself up to be the "Pac-Man: the Movie" that it wasn't.
Porky's, Mr. T, and Richard Gere carrying out girls certainly haven't aged well, but just try and get audiences away from them at the time.
(And FWIW, Grease 2 writer Ken Finkleman that same year went on to write/direct one of '82's more unfairly overlooked guilty pleasures, "Airplane II: the Sequel".)