Friday, 20 February 1998

WEEKEND PREVIEW
You're running a studio's distribution department. It's the second weekend after the Academy Award nominations. Titanic is breaking new records every week. What do you release to compete in this marketplace? Answer: Nothing much. Columbia is throwing the artsy Palmetto to the wolves. It may be a good movie, but people are likely to wait until video to find out. Likely to open stronger is Senseless (about $9 million), but go quickly because when word-of-mouth starts, things could get ugly in a hurry. This film stinks literally and figuratively (meaning that if you love flatulence jokes, this is your film). The only change in the Top Five that I foresee is Sphere dropping down from slot three to slot five behind Titanic, The Wedding Singer, Good Will Hunting and Senseless.

THE GOOD: Titanic takes the title of third-highest-grossing film of all time after passing Jurassic Park at $376 million. The only films left to overtake are E.T. and Star Wars, both of which benefited from highly successful re-releases. Paramount hopes to leave E.T. in the rearview mirror before the month ends.

THE BAD: An annonymous buyer bought 34 telegraph messages sent from the Titanic after it hit the iceberg for $123,500 -- a little over $3,600 per message. The only film in wide release to match or surpass that figure per screen last weekend? Titanic.

THE UGLY: Desperate Measures and Deep Rising are averaging less than $250 a day per screen in just their third weekend in theaters. What was Deep Rising about again?

THE SEDUCTION OF VIDEO: Air Force One's home video debut last weekend generated about $65 million in rentals and purchases, almost twice as much as the film grossed in its opening weekend last July. This shows, once again, why studios are so easily seduced into the diminutive six-month video windows that are now the norm. Too much green to turn away.

TWO BAD MOVIES EQUAL: Sphere + Zero Effect = "Sphero Effect"
It's a high-priced saga of a multimillionaire novelist who suffers a crappy adaptation of one of his hit books, forcing him to cancel plans to purchase Guam and all its inhabitants. In the horrifying climax, he writes Jurassic Park 3.

JUST WONDERING: Krippendorf's Tribe is sneaking into theaters this weekend and is beginning to look like a hit, but is a movie about white suburbanites putting on black face paint and mimicking Third World cultures hysterically funny or downright racist?

READER OF THE DAY: Sam S.: "People seem to think the Academy is one big collective that chooses nominees deliberately. Obviously, it is not. It's a vast group of people who vote on the nominations, and there would be no possible way to impose or even encourage quotas."

---

E ME: The weekend is here. What are you going to see at the movies? I'll be here all weekend with News By The Numbers.