Take a look at this summer’s movie box office, and it seems as if things have never been better.
Revenues for the season are up 10 percent over last year (around $1.5 billion since Memorial Day, when the summer season officially kicks off). Five films have already crossed the $100 million mark, and three of those have either made or are close to making $200 million (“Pearl Harbor,” “The Mummy Returns” and “Shrek”). And with a host of promising money-makers like “Jurassic Park III,” “Rat Race” and “Planet of the Apes” yet to come, Hollywood is riding high.
Or is it?
Behind the scenes, insiders are voicing a note of caution. Because despite the box office gold, there are troubling signs that all is not quite as rosy as it appears.
Most worrying is the rapid drop-off of almost all the big openers.
Steven Spielberg and Warner Bros.’ “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” was a case in point. The much-touted movie opened to a reasonable $29.4 million, then plummeted 52 percent in its second weekend a deadly drop, given how much its backers had hoped for strong word-of-mouth to propel the film forward.
Paramount’s “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” opened with a terrific $47.7 million, but then swooned 59 percent in its second weekend.
And “Pearl Harbor” fell 61 percent in its second week, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s box office analyst, Brian Fuson though, given its blockbuster four-day-weekend opening take of $75.2 million, a fall-off like that was only to be expected.
Still, this summer’s movies have sagged an average 50 percent from weekend number one to weekend number two a huge change from the average 30 percent fall-off of two years ago.
“It’s so front-loaded now,” says Revolution Studios partner Tom Sherak. “And it’s very hard to do anything about that.”
That’s not the only bad news. While no hard figures are in, many executives believe that negative costs are up slightly (that is, the price of actually making a movie), and marketing expenses are still heading skyward at an alarming rate a trend likely to increase as studios pump more and more money into television ads to boost that crucial opening weekend.
According to Motion Picture Association figures, last year’s studio releases averaged $27.3 million apiece in marketing expenses that’s in addition to their $54.8 million average production cost. And insiders believe summer 2001 will have surpassed even those eye-popping numbers.
Similarly, ticket prices, which last year hovered around $5.39 on average, also are up they are estimated to have climbed 3 to 5 percent since the end of 2000.
This may be good news for the exhibition side of the business, which has been sorely plagued by bankruptcies and stagnant attendance. But it is not so stellar for the studios making the movies.
Right now, at the halfway point in the summer movie season, the fall-out from all this is merely a ripple of concern passing through the number-crunchers. But if the new releases don’t hold up better, that anxiety could spread fast.
Contributing columnist Stephen Galloway can be reached at [email protected].
