STUDIOS—Season Starts Early As Pressures Mount

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Spring has barely sprung throughout the Northern Hemisphere, except in Hollywood, where summer is dawning.

The entertainment industry traditionally kicks off its crucial summer blockbuster season on Memorial Day weekend, but this year it’s debuting May 4 with Universal Pictures’ opening of “The Mummy Returns,” a sequel to its 1999 remake of the 1932 horror classic.

The early start is reflective of the industry’s precarious labor situation, rising production costs, stagnating box-office revenue growth and intense competition among the studios to be box-office king. In short, Hollywood has more riding on this summer than on any season in recent memory.

“It looks like one of the most competitive summers ever,” said Sherry Lansing, chairman of Paramount Pictures’ movie division. “And it looks like there will be more wonderful movies than ever.”

Hollywood better hope so.

Last year’s summer box office, for the first time in years, was down. It drooped 4 percent from the previous summer, for a total of $2.75 billion, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s box-office analyst Brian Fuson. Ticket sales were also off, and have essentially been static for a number of years. Meanwhile, the cost of the average studio movie went up 6 percent last year, to $45.8 million, with the average marketing cost jumping 11 percent to $27.3 million, according to Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America.

With costs climbing, and with writers’ and actors’ demands that could force the studios to give up additional hundreds of millions of dollars, success this summer season is crucial.

Despite those high stakes, or possibly because of them, Hollywood is relying more than ever this summer on the tried-and-true formula of sequels and remakes. Among them are Universal’s “Jurassic Park III” (July 18), 20th Century Fox’s “Planet of the Apes” (July 27), Fox’s “Dr. Dolittle 2” (June 22), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “Rollerball” (Aug. 17), and New Line Cinema’s “Rush Hour 2” (Aug. 3). Not since the era of “Rocky” and “Rambo” has Hollywood come down with such a severe case of sequelitis.


Promotional blitzkrieg

Like every other year, this summer’s biggest extravaganza, Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay’s $140 million-plus “Pearl Harbor,” will debut on Memorial Day weekend.

Television ads and billboards (including the controversial building-draping one in Westwood) have already begun to bombard consumers for the film that distributor Walt Disney Co. hopes will be a “Jurassic Park”-size blockbuster. Those ads and a dramatic movie trailer have generated a sizable must-see quotient.

“We’re opening on as many screens as we can get,” said Bruckheimer, speaking from the Morocco location of his latest movie, “Black Hawk Down.”

Bruckheimer admits that the studio toyed with opening “Pearl Harbor” on Dec. 7, the 60th anniversary of the day the Japanese invaded but “that would have meant holding the picture several months,” not to mention losing the vast summer audience.

But Disney execs are still nervous. As well they should be because the movie isn’t just a test of the studio’s ability to maintain the No. 1 position, which it has held at the box office for the past three years. It will also give a verdict on how well Disney’s movie arm can do without its former chairman, Joe Roth, who exited the company last year to create his own venture, Revolution Studios.

Despite this summer’s wave of sequels, several studios are still risking a great deal on pictures that aim to offer a brand-new kind of experience to audiences. These range from an avant-garde musical from Fox, to a medieval jousting drama from Sony Pictures Entertainment, to a special effects marathon from Paramount, to a Steven Spielberg movie from Warner Bros.

Fox is risking the early part of the summer on “Moulin Rouge,” which will not only be a test-case to see if untraditional summer fare can work as effective “counter-programming,” but will also serve as a test of Nicole Kidman’s drawing power away from Tom Cruise.

Paramount kicks off its expensive and much-touted “Tomb Raider,” starring Angelina Jolie, on June 15; while Sony is hoping Australian newcomer Heath Ledger (who played Mel Gibson’s son in “The Patriot”) will have enough charisma to draw crowds when “A Knight’s Tale” opens May 11 comfortably enough ahead of the summer onslaught to mask the fact that Ledger is hardly a household name.

But the most watched release of all perhaps of the entire summer will be Spielberg’s filmed version of the project that Stanley Kubrick was developing when he died, “A.I.,” for “artificial intelligence” (June 29).

More than mere movies are at stake with each of these releases.

“Studios want to say they had the No. 1 market share because that reflects well on Wall Street,” says producer Adam Fields (“Great Balls of Fire”). “And Wall Street is far less aware about the ROI (return on investment) and how much these guys actually spent to get that market share.”

For Disney, which follows “Pearl Harbor” with its animated release “Atlantis” (June 15), this summer provides a much-needed chance to boost the company’s profile after its stock has weathered a rocky year as well as show that life does indeed continue after Roth.

For MGM, which follows “Rollerball” with the late summer opener “Original Sin” (Aug. 3) starring Antonio Banderas and Jolie, it’s a shot at proving that the studio which until recently was considered on the down-and-outs is back in business under new management, and that its earlier blockbuster “Hannibal” wasn’t a fluke.

For actress Jolie, it’s a chance to prove she can carry not just one but two big-budget movies: “Tomb Raider” and “Original Sin.”

And for the ubiquitous Roth, whose first release under his Revolution Studios banner, “Tomcats,” tanked, it’s a chance to show that his company can not just have a real hit, but one he actually dared to direct himself: the Julia Roberts romantic comedy “America’s Sweetheart,” which is slated to open sometime this summer.

So, as the curtain goes up on the summer movie season, industry observers prepare to critique the box-office performances. And for now they seem predictably upbeat.

“The summer looks promising,” notes the Hollywood Reporter’s analyst Fuson. “But then again, they all do at this time of the year.”

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