Quake Movie Takes Crack At Summer Ticket Sales

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Quake Movie Takes Crack At Summer Ticket Sales
High Concept: Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in ad for disaster film ‘San Andreas.’

Brace yourself! A blockbuster new movie about an earthquake destroying Los Angeles aims to shake up the summer box-office battle as a rare original story amid a sea of sequels.

Warner Bros. release “San Andreas” is taking on the tent poles with a disaster epic starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as an L.A. helicopter rescue pilot trying to save his family when a magnitude-9 quake shatters Southern California.

The movie industry is waiting to see if the special effects spectacular, out May 29, will have enough muscle to compete in a summer packed with brand-name reboots and sequels like “Jurassic World,” “Terminator: Genisys,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Mission Impossible 5,” “Fantastic Four,” “Ted 2,” and the superhero blockbuster that will kick off the summer battle May 1, “Avengers: Age of Ultron.”

“San Andreas” director Brad Peyton certainly sounded a note of confidence, saying, “Ours is an original piece, and I think that in itself is a rarity these days. The film’s biggest strength is that it’s not trying to be like all the other movies.”

Vivian Mayer, of Century City marketing and publicity firm Mayer & Associates, said that while the film isn’t part of a successful series, it has one very bankable feature to its credit: Leading man Johnson is fresh off the huge success of this month’s “Furious 7,” the year’s biggest hit so far, with earnings of more than $250 million in the United States from just its first two weeks in release.

“San Andreas may not be a sequel, but it offers real firepower from Dwayne Johnson, whose huge fan base will follow him just about anywhere,” said Mayer, who worked at several studios before opening her own shop.

Ripping apart

Reportedly budgeted at $100 million and to be released in both standard and 3-D formats, “San Andreas” takes its name from the tectonic fault line running through most of California. The movie’s plot sees the fault line ripping apart and laying waste to the whole Golden State, in the process destroying the Hollywood Sign and other L.A. landmarks while flooding the whole of San Francisco.

Adding the human element to the horror, Johnson’s L.A. rescue helicopter pilot character wings his way across a collapsing California trying to save his estranged wife and his daughter.

The movie marks a first step into the action blockbuster big time for Canadian director Peyton, 35, whose previous credits include “Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.”

“We know this film depicts a worst-case scenario, but we did a lot of research to make sure the science behind the spectacle was as real as possible and talked to quake experts in Los Angeles,” he said.

Among those experts was seismologist Tom Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC, who expects that his input was not fully absorbed.

“I met with the director Brad Peyton and producer Beau Flynn and read an early version of the script. I pointed out it was completely implausible,” he said. “We don’t have magnitude-9 quakes here or tsunamis associated with a large quake on the San Andreas. And while I haven’t seen the film, it appears from the trailers that’s all in the finished movie anyway.”

Despite those lapses, Jordan said, there could yet be value in the entertainment confection.

“I understand it’s Hollywood. I don’t expect action movies to be scientifically correct,” he said. “What films like this can do is increase earthquake awareness and preparedness.”

Jordan said he was not paid to consult on the film.

Meanwhile, a Caltech spokesman said the film’s producer was given a tour of the university’s seismological laboratory facility but seismologists there declined to consult on the movie due to time pressures.

L.A. disaster

This is the first giant-scale cinema disaster movie revolving around a massive temblor in Los Angeles since 1974’s “Earthquake,” starring Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner.

Unlike that movie, only a couple of days of filming for this one were actually done in Los Angeles. Underlining the city’s problems in keeping big-budget movies here, the majority of the two-month shoot for “San Andreas” was done in Queensland, Australia.

The film was granted a portion of Australia’s $20 million film fund to attract overseas movies and also benefited from federal rebates, local payroll tax rebates and a Queensland film production incentive scheme.

California has responded to the threat – not the first it has faced either at home or abroad – by expanding its Film & TV Tax Credit Program to include a wider range of projects, including by expanding eligibility to big-budget features.

With the summer 2015 box-office battle soon to begin, the “San Andreas” team believe they have enough spectacle to compete with the superheroes and the sequels.

Or as Peyton put it, “If you like shit blowing up, this is the film for you.”

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