Gross Behaviour - by Leonard Klady

There Ain’t No Cure for the Summertime
Black and Blues

It’s perforce that at this moment in time pundits will trot out the seasonal box office numbers, declare winners and losers and mostly miss the point.

Summer 2003 for all its sturm und drang was a lot like summer 2002 and 2001. The numbers weren’t as big as last year’s either in terms of box office or, most certainly, in regard to admissions. Still there were many popular releases with a decided emphasis on action oriented franchises and potential franchises.

Finding Nemo, the top grossing film of the season, wasn’t officially a sequel but certainly a branded entertainment very much in keeping with Pixar animation’s handful of earlier features including Toy Story and A Bug’s Life. The Matrix Reloaded served up the second chapter of a soon to be completed trilogy and The Pirates of the Caribbean was so popular it’s most certainly doomed to walk the plank one more time.

Because the season isn’t legally defined, numbers will vary but the underlying results won’t be seriously altered. Measuring the season from mid-May (when the Matrix sequel debuted) through the Labor Day weekend, the summer tally is slightly more than $3.4 billion or 4% less than the same period of 2002. Ticket sales shrank by roughly 8% to 580 million.

None of this should be shocking. Historically, the greatest strides or upturns in movie going occur during periods when movie theaters are playing popular and original films. During the past four months the mainstream has been dominated by the familiar. Of the 17 features released during the period that will gross in excess of $100 million, 10 were sequels or remakes and that doesn’t include Legally Blonde 2, Freddy vs. Jason or the new Lara Croft. The disconcerting aspect of this reliance on things past is that almost all the retreads proved popular. There’s no question that several were commercial disappointments but that has less to do with drawing in an audience than on keeping the costs to produce and market a film in check.

Given the myriad changes in the way films are made and the relationship between the studios and talent, it’s probably safe to predict that there will never be another series as popular and long running as James Bond. The key people behind those films have been uniquely shrewd on both a business and story basis. What they pulled off is virtually impossible to replicate today. The Bonds were independently produced, something George Lucas could not effect with Star Wars until it became a hit and in that instance something he’s been unable to maintain artistically or hand off to someone with the zeal to bring it into a new century.

Truly one needs the stewardship of a studio - but one with a sensibility that hasn’t existed in decades - to oversee the financial and profit sharing elements of a popular character or series. It also ought to take a hands on attitude about how to balance the familiar and novel that will satisfy the fan base and steadily expand it. Unfortunately the ranks of creative senior execs appear to be headed toward the tar pits like so many species of dinosaur and the result is that once vibrant serials evolve into cynical cash cows that ultimately squander both good will and good ideas. So, these films become an exercise in bean counting.

The remaining seven titles grossing more than $100 million include films derived from television (S.W.A.T.), comic books (The Hulk), a theme park ride (The Pirates of the Caribbean) and, directly and indirectly, other movies. Two of the films were comedy vehicles tailored for stars (Bruce Almighty, Daddy Day Care) and that brings us down to the last two movies, Nemo and Seabiscuit, the latter adapted from a non-fiction bestseller.

It may not completely be the decision of studios to remove films that aspire to something that, for lack of better words, are viewed as serious and adult from the summer schedule. There’s a sort of perverse thinking that Seabiscuit or last year’s The Road to Perdition or even Saving Private Ryan cannot compete with the Bad Boys or the good girls of Charlies Angels. Yet all three were popular and critical successes, entertaining and aggressively marketed as the alternative viewing choice. It’s hard to imagine releasing Terminator 3 in December as the slam-bang entertainment option to The Pianist, About Schmidt and The Hours.

Nonetheless the embedded thinking is that there are only a couple of times during the year when expensive action movies can be released and because of holiday timing have the possibility of generating more than $200 million in North America. It’s also believed that films dependent on critical praise and awards are advantaged by opening as close to the end of the year as possible.

This would be an opportune moment to apply Newtonian theory to the marketplace. Sir Isaac observed that two bodies cannot exist in the same place at the same time. The average American multiplex has nine screens and has a programming philosophy that is all inclusive. On a typical Friday from May through August, three new films will open in 2,000 plus theaters across North America. One of the trio will likely be a pre-sold vehicle such as Legally Blonde 2 that both the distributor and exhibitor want to play on more than a single screen, so a major chain theater in a medium-sized market is confronted with losing almost half its screens every week.

As with snowflakes, no two situations are exactly alike. Multiplexes are generally built in even numbers and depending on the market may have competition which at least eases the burden of holding films which remain popular more than two weeks. Exhibitors like to keep these pictures because their percentage of the box office increases the longer they play an individual title. However, the bottom line is that most venues have to juggle screens and split times (run a family film for matinees and an R-rated feature in the evening) in order to maintain a supermarket policy.

In this Darwinian environment distributors bank on sure bets and statistically sequels have better survival odds. At another point in time, Seabiscuit would be viewed as an entertaining adult film with the cache of selling a lot of books. But it’s summer and the thinking becomes that the thoroughbred is a commercial long shot. It’s also an expensive movie from a major company and will not work as a limited release. It has to command those 2,000 plus screens.

Is there room for two adult movies in summer?

In point of fact, there were a considerable number of alternative movies that proved popular this past summer that appealed almost exclusively to people 25 years and older. Films such as Swimming Pool, Spellbound and Winged Migration were consistent earners and rarely earned berths in conventional multiplexes. Harking back to Newton, they could not exist at the same place and time as Freddy vs. Jason, The Italian Job or even Gigli.

Seabiscuit could compete on the main stage and, even assuming the most cynical attitude, there’s likely room for a handful of adult titles among the roughly 45 major releases unleashed during the season. However, at this juncture marketplace realities have to be tossed out and supplanted with the human condition. If I am a powerful producer, I want my high profile sequel to open at the height of summer when I can attract the maximum audience and there’s little a studio exec can say to convince me that it will gross as high a figure were it to open in March or October. Besides, I’m on a breakneck schedule to deliver wet prints on Independence Day.

Conversely, an Oscar pedigree filmmaker is likely dead set about premiering his film at Venice and Toronto and following up on that acclaim with a general release in October or November. That breed is as unbendable in their thinking as the hypothetical producer with the potential megahit. He or she will not let a film go quietly into the marketplace before Labor Day no matter how many examples of Oscar winners or commercial hits aimed at 25 pluses are served up as argument to their rock hard conviction.

Just as there is the self-fulfilling prophecy of success, there is the inevitability of failure and the latter becomes increasingly evident as the season comes to a close. As most films are massaged and tested, the instances where a movie’s reception departs radically from focus group response is very rare. Several years back, Fox saw that preview audiences were wild about There’s Something About Mary. They knew they had a hit; they simply could not gauge how big it would be commercially. Similarly, the studios of Marci X, Grind and the much-maligned Gigli were all aware that audiences were not responding positively to those films.

So, the double-edged sword becomes to both quietly bury a film (impossible when it involves high-profile talent) while hopefully still generating the maximum gross the summer season affords. Sometimes there are surprises as occurred last summer when Sony’s The Master of Disguise with Dana Carvey was slipped into theaters and connected to the tune of $40 million. There was nothing remotely comparable in 2003 and to be more precise, the losers performed even more dismally than low-ball expectations had predicted. The marketplace reality has evolved into a year round cycle in which films either hit or misfire from the opening bell.

The last note truly requires more scrutiny (can you smell a separate column next week?). It’s the so-called alternative arena that, according to data, declined by 17% from 2002. The reality couldn’t be more starkly contradictory and requires, for now, a quick explanation. One year ago, the surprise hit of summer was My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It grossed better than $80 million during the season, a healthy sum coming from independent screens. The picture itself wasn’t, apart from its cast, all that different from a comedy by one of the majors. However, its indie distributor had to earn the picture’s multiplex dates and that route was paved by initial success from alternative dates.

Again, it’s time to invoke Newton. The marketplace is ultimately finite no matter how much elasticity it can tolerate. The presence of My Big Fat Greek Wedding displaced other films on screen at that time and its absence a year later created somewhat of a vacuum that could not be comparably filled. It was an anomaly and like the real-life Seabiscuit requires adding (or subtracting) weights to level the playing field.

Summer Season: May 16 - September 1, 2003

Rank 2003	Distributor	Box Office	Market Share	% Change	Rank 2002
1	Buena Vista	783	23.00%	78%	3
2	Universal	729.6	21.40%	300%	5
3	Sony	484.3	14.20%	-50%	1
4	Warner Bros.	436.8	12.80%	18%	4
5	Paramount	208	6.10%	1%	7
6	Fox	167.2	4.90%	-66%	2
7	MGM	141.7	4.20%	99%	11
8	Miramax	132.6	3.90%	7%	9
9	New Line	116.4	3.40%	-47%	6
10	Fox Searchlight	74.9	2.20%	619%	14
11	DreamWorks	28	0.80%	-84%	8
-	Other	103.8	3.10%	-17%	-
-		3406.3	100.00%	-4%	-
Note: IFC ranked 10th in 2002 with a 2.3% market share