Monday, 31 July 2000

WEEKEND REVIEW

And here is why sanity in writing about Hollywood is often submerged. In its third weekend, X-Men fell an estimated 51 percent, which will turn out to be more like 53 percent again. How does this affect sanity? Well, jumping on the negative or the positive with excessive speed is part of the daily, gotta-be-first stupidity of entertainment journalism. Last weekend, when X-Men's Friday numbers were lower than expected, hyperactive assessments about the film were premature. The second weekend tells part of the story. The third weekend really tends to give you some real perspective and an idea of what the legs are like.

I like X-Men a lot. But its box office trajectory now looks more like the trajectory of Batman & Robin than anything else. X-Men opened bigger and its first weekend drop was 6 percent better, but on its third weekend, Batman & Robin leveled out at a 49 percent drop, a few percent better than X-Men did this weekend. Does this make sense? Not to me. The word of mouth on X-Men has been unusually good. And yet, it's hit the wall pretty hard. If things continue like this, X-Men never quite hits $150 million domestic. Still profitable, but disappointing.

Producer Douglas Wick, at a roundtable for Hollow Man on Saturday, said of box office legs, "The opening weekend is more about breaking even. The legs are about making the real dough."

And so, now the questions start, in earnest. How did Fox fail to capitalize on the successful opening and positive across-the-board critical buzz? I haven't seen much TV lately, but I caught a commercial focusing on Wolverine as one of the X-Men before I was at the ComicCon net panel last weekend and mentioned it to Tom DeSanto, who indicated that he wasn't a huge fan of focusing on individual characters in selling the movie. Spots I've seen since seem to hit the wider goals of the early campaign. I respectfully disagree with DeSanto. I think that what X-Men needed was a full and vigorous second tier campaign, using a completely different massage, including the fact that girls like the movie, people over 30 like the movie, people over 40 like the movie and so on. Tell the story of individuals in a compelling 30-second spot. Get the audience who doesn't know what X-Men is to connect in some way.

Of course, this costs money. A lot of money. X-Men will be profitable. In fact, even at $140 million domestic, it will likely be one of the 10 most profitable movies of the summer of 2000 when all markets are tallied up. How much is a company like Fox willing to spend in marketing in order to expand the domestic box office further past $100 million when $200 million is not in the cards anymore? Remember, every dollar of marketing now takes $2 or so in box office revenues to recover. So, if Fox decided to go and kill for this film and spend an extra $10 million on TV ads to get a new message out, that investment would have to payoff to the tune of $20 million at the box office. That's more than half of what the film projects to make domestically the rest of the way. There is little motivation for Fox to make that investment, no matter how much they like the movie. So the beat goes on.

Oh yes. And by the way. The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps opened to an estimated $42.7 million. What does it mean? Not much. The tracking was close on this one and the film is off to a strong start, as expected. Lots of writers love, Love, LOVE record breaking reportage. I don't really care much about records. And I think that reporting on this weekend's overall vs. last year this weekend is one of the stupidest stats reported every week. And in the weeks to come, we'll find out how strong the Klump family is. Without even running numbers, I'm guess that the film will have a very happy $140 million run. We shall see.

And What Lies Beneath is reporting a very impressive 26 percent drop. Even if that falls to 28- 30 percent, that's the mark of real box office success these days. Especially after a near $30 million start. The film should hit $100 million sometime in the weekend of August 11 and could go on to hit the $140 million mark...maybe higher Any film that does four times its opening weekend these days has had a good run. Getting near five times your opening is pretty rare. Right now, only Gladiator has pulled it off this summer. That's something for Zemeckis & Co. to reach for.

THE GOOD: Anne Taylor Fleming of PBS' "Newshour with Jim Lehrer" wrote a very interesting piece on current pop culture that ran in this Sunday's L.A Times. I'm not sure that I agree with her, but the hypothesis of the article is that there is something a little sick about the current fascination with faux poverty on TV, symbolized by "Survivor," a show abut people who are stuck on an island and starving on purpose while others on the planet starve for real. You to may disagree or agree, but the read is definitely worthy of your time.

THE BAD: I don't know if any of you care, but Kim Masters' new gig at Inside.com has her on the same turf as Claudia Eller of the L.A. Times and subtle signs of a journalistic bar brawl are showing up more and more often. On one side, Eller was doing a Friday piece on how DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg, long considered an Eller ally around town, was working the new king of Universal, Vivendi's Jean-Marie Messier, into a big bucks deal for Universal to keep distributing DreamWorks product internationally and on home video, using the occasion of Imagine's Nutty Professor 2 premiere to corner his prey. On the other, Masters continued to insist that "things are getting nasty" between the two companies, following up on her story that DreamWorks was drifting away from Universal quite intentionally, fishing for deals at Herb Allen's Sun Valley retreat. Ironically, Masters references Eller's L.A. Times article (without attribution to Eller) as "blistering" in a piece that came out late Friday. I'm not sure which part of the Eller article she was reading. I saw the Eller piece as a veritable love letter to Katzenberg, putting him in the aggressor's seat in getting a new deal at Universal. A deal which is very, very likely to happen given Steven Spielberg's long relationship with the studio. But a deal for which Katzenberg was unlikely to get credit. Until Eller's article hit.

Both journalists seem clear on the fact that David Geffen dislikes Edgar Bronfman Jr. these days. And that may be the clue that makes all this make sense and brings into question other questions about the future of DreamWorks. Is Katzenberg feeding Eller one story while Geffen is feeding Masters a different perspective, with Spielberg continuing, as usual, to play the strong, silent-to-the-media type? Masters' piece from late Friday seemed almost a like a direct response to Eller. And what did Masters add to her argument to make the case for disaster a little stronger? Music. Geffen's area of almost exclusive responsibility at DreamWorks.

Is DreamWorks inalterably a house divided? Or is this all a tempest in a teapot? Somewhere in between, I suspect. But Hollywood is a city in play these days. In the midst of their first full slate and some real success, DreamWorks is still too often the topic of "What's really next?" conversation. Universal is sailing with a perception of rudderlessness and inevitable change. Fox's leadership ousted Mechanic and has gone almost a month without naming a successor to Bill Mechanic. The other shoe is heading floorward at Sony. The Lorenzo DiBonaventura deathwatch at Warner Bros. continues unabated. Disney is looking for its sea legs. And Paramount is the only major left with what appears to be stone-stable film division. Politics are everywhere. And those politics drive reportage of the business. Keep reading between the lines. That's where all the information is.

The Swingers, the Pols & All Thumbs"