..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Not With a Bang … Summer 2003 eased out with MGM's debut of Jeepers Creepers 2 leading into fall with an estimated $18.2 million for the four-day holiday finale. The sequel bowed with a roughly 15% higher gross than its predecessor and gave the long weekend a slight boost from Labor Day 2002. The season traditionally winds down as fall semesters kick in and this year was no exception. Distributors are loathe to open anything other than a genre movie as occurred a year ago when the sole national release was Warner Bros.' feardotcom that squeezed into fifth position with $7.1 million. Jeepers 2 and a handful of regional and exclusive debuts should generate about $125 million in ticket sales to reflect a 6% hike from last year and a slight 1% drop from seven days earlier. Overall business reflected a viewing status quo with the exception of a couple of niche titles that are expanding well, including Thirteen, American Splendor and, in the current upbeat non-fiction environment, Step Into Liquid. Otherwise, the chief talking point of the frame was that four summer titles crossed into the vaunted $100 million box office club - Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Seabiscuit, S.W.A.T. and The Italian Job which was specifically reissued to that end. In the coming weeks, both American Wedding and Freaky Friday will also pass $100 million domestically for a tally of 17 seasonal titles including five that grossed more than $200 million. While the number of films performing at that level or better is a record, the box office itself hasn't markedly improved (final figures notwithstanding) from past years and that means admissions have actually declined. Again, a final scrutiny may provide a better perspective but an initial scan suggests that while more films have become popular successes, summer 2003 appears to have also generated a record number of films that failed to spark public interest. The mainstream industry has evolved into a business of hits and misses and the prospect of building a film into a modest success doesn't fit into the equation. That scenario occurs almost never by design and in rare instances by happenstance. Innovation, a company with a soft spot for family films, did a 63 screen break in Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix and Salt Lake on the New Zealand movie The Legend of Johnny Lingo and generated an OK $140,000 gross. Not nearly on the crowd pleasing level of Whale Rider, it will probably roll out to secondary markets prior to video release. The frame also saw the launch of the Sundance series with The Other Side of the Bed from Spain. The comedy generated an unimpressive $35,000 from nine locations and, as with the similarly conceived Shooting Gallery series, will likely rise and fall on the qualities of its initial four selections. Sony Classics' Once Upon a Time in the Midlands faired a bit better with an estimated $30,000 at six theaters and Lions Gate's social drama Civil Brand had a $120,000 box office at 35 sites. The Slimmer Summer Summer, in the film industry, is only partially tied to the calendar. While the potency of 2003 won't change markedly based upon where one puts the boundaries of the season, it's worth noting the current options. The traditional summer (long since abandoned by those in the biz) used to begin on the Memorial Day weekend and run through to Labor Day. However, in the past decade, distributors have successfully jump started the season by getting an edge on the competition by bowing much anticipated fare a week early and then a week earlier than that to the point where many now consider the first weekend of May to be the start of the movie summer. What has not transpired is an extension of the season and, if one applies the former logic, one has to conclude that the back end has retreated. In the real world, school terms have been realigned to the point that there are very few areas of the country that commence fall sessions post-Labor Day. There is an enduring psychological sense of a new season beginning in September but, for practical reasons and viewing trends, summer movie business comes to an end around the second weekend of August. The coming days will bring an assault of summer box office wraps with wildly different numbers because each pundit has his own sense of the season. I've been wrestling with redefining it but frankly time ran out before I could give it the time to reassess and configure, so my summer will begin one week before Memorial Day and conclude with the past weekend. The thorniest aspect of changing the time frame is finally that a true comparison with prior years cannot be done with a comparative calendar. The release trends of 2003 do not conform with those of 1997 and most certainly bear virtually no resemblance to 1989, the seminal summer that changed the movie going businesss. - by Leonard Klady