Ever since the era of “Rocky” and “Rambo,” studio executives have had a mandate to search for the kind of material that can spawn not just one movie, but a whole series a “franchise,” in Hollywood parlance.
Franchises like “Batman” and “Lethal Weapon” offer not just vast box-office revenues, but also millions of dollars from licensing and merchandising, TV spin-offs and so on. This summer, studios like Twentieth Century Fox and New Line Cinema are gambling heavily on their own attempts to build new franchises with pictures like “Dr. Dolittle 2” and “Rush Hour 2.”
Now burgeoning indie Lions Gate Entertainment is giving it a shot. The Canadian-based company behind such pictures as “Gods and Monsters” and “Dogma” has greenlit “American Psycho 2,” to be shot before this summer’s anticipated Screen Actors Guild strike.
The latest installment will feature a new killer, coed Mila Kunis (“Get Over It”), rather than the original’s Christian Bale, who played the main character of Bret Easton Ellis’ original book on which the film was based.
If Lions Gate is successful, it may help boost the company’s profile considerably. But the project’s a risk. The first “American Psycho” made only a little over $15 million at the box office it might have made more, until Leonardo Di Caprio dropped out of the lead role.
And perhaps the Canadian-based firm should remember the lesson that fellow indie Artisan Entertainment learned: After striking gold with “The Blair Witch Project,” the company was ready to launch an IPO based on its success, when “Witch 2” came out and bombed. Artisan took itself off the market and insiders have been waiting for “Witch 3” ever since.
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Speaking of Artisan, ” for its upcoming contemporary drama “The Center of the World,” the company has decided to follow a strategy it used in distributing “Requiem for a Dream” it will release the picture without an MPAA rating.
That worked for the Oscar-nominated “Requiem,” but Artisan may have hit a snag. Several newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, balked at running an ad for the Wayne Wang-directed film about an Internet millionaire who becomes infatuated with a stripper because it’s too risqu & #233;.
The ad features a frontal shot of a woman with her legs in the air, head back, a lollipop in her mouth, and the caption: “Warning. Sex. Come Closer. Enter.”
After considerable back-and-forth between Artisan and the N.Y. Times, the Times eventually ran a doctored ad with the words but no image.
Just as the industry is gearing up for the May 25 release of “Pearl Harbor,” Jerry Bruckheimer, one of Hollywood’s top movie producers, is expanding his television activities. Bruckheimer, whose pictures range from “Flashdance” to “Top Gun” to “Con Air,” has long been based in a movie deal at the Walt Disney Co., but for his TV projects he is in talks to sign a pact with Warner Bros. Television. His recent venture into the small screen, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” has been a considerable success for CBS.
Contributing columnist Stephen Galloway can be reached at [email protected].
