Tuesday, 13 January 1998

The movie line-ups are set. For Super Sunday. Studios are paying $1.3 million for 30 seconds of Super Bowl advertising hoping to become the next ID4 or Men In Black. Is it worth the money? Probably not. If you don't blow up the White House or offer something no one's seen before, the time probably costs more than it's worth. This year's 30-second stars will be Sphere (opening in a few weeks), Lost In Space (opening in a few months) and The Mark of Zorro (opening this summer). MIB studio, Sony, apparently got the idea that laying out $1.3 million for Godzilla to go Super was unnecessary given the already huge wave of anticipation, thus the Zorro ad instead. But who knows? Maybe the lizard will make a surprise appearance. Going the full monty is Disney's Armageddon, which will get the meteor rolling with a full $2.6 million minute. Trying to establish itself as the surefire runner up (or better) for summer, Disney is hoping that size does matter.

After turning the Bond series a little upside down as a woman who could whoop butt with the best of `em in Tomorrow Never Dies, Michelle Yeoh is hot, hot, hot. Even before signing Yeoh to a deal, United Artists has signed Mitch Markowitz, screenwriter of Good Morning, Vietnam, to write a kind of inverse, comedic The Bodyguard to star Yeoh and a male comic. Proceeding in the script development process without a star isn't that unusual, but Yeoh will be pretty much irreplaceable, having created her own category of studio starlet.

Speaking of spec purchases, Hollywood Pictures has forked over $600,000 for the English-language remake rights to Kiler, a Polish action comedy, with hopes that it will become a Barry Sonnenfeld comedy in the future. Kiler, which translates astonishingly to Hitman, is the story of a taxi driver mistaken as a hitman who then decides that maybe the job isn't such a bad idea. The film is the highest-grossing film ever in Poland, which sounds like the set-up for a joke, but isn't.

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