What does the Attack of the Clones opening mean?

Well, I want to take a look at the last five massive movies; Pearl Harbor, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man and now, Send in the Clones.  But before we get to that, a little perspective.

Even with Spider-Man and Episode 2 included, there are still only 13 movies that have passed the $300 million mark domestically.  Before last year, the only other year in movie history that sported two such films was 1994, with The Lion King and Forrest Gump. 

The Lion King would prove to be the height of the Disney animation revival cycle.  At the time, it was only the fourth $40 million opening in movie history and there still has not been an animated movie capable of breaking the $300 million barrier, 2-D, 3-D or any other D.  It was a phenomenon created by a powerful franchise and a great movie.  Forrest Gump took the more traditional approach, opening with “just” $24 million and showing legs as long as Forrest himself. 

Hollywood types not named Spielberg or Lucas have been chasing the $300 million standard ever since.  And until last year, only ID4 and Titanic had managed to make the grade.  And, ironically, there was a disparity in the opening numbers much like the one in 1994.  ID4 started with $50 million, at that point only the second $50 million weekend in history.  And Titanic started with a mere $28 million and was leggy, leggy, leggy.

Last year, we seemed to turn a corner.  We had the second year in history with two $300 million movies.  One of them, Harry Potter was the biggest opener ever… at the time.  The other, Fellowship of the Ring, was the twenty-second biggest opening ever, had longer legs and similar final results to Potter. 

You might expect that we’d have to wait a while before a year with two $300 movies again.  Yet, here we are in 2002 and we have already had two of the three biggest openings in movie history, both films are mortal locks for the $300 million club and there is more to come.  While a $300 million domestic total is not a lock for any of these pictures, Men In Black II, Signs, Minority Report, Lilo & Stitch, Goldmember and XXX are all serious candidates for the $50 million opening club this summer alone, with another Potter, another Rings, a new Bond, a new Star Trek and a Spielberg/Hanks/DiCaprio already locked in for the holiday season.  That’s a legitimate group of thirteen films that could open at over $50 million in 2002.  That would make the $50 million opening the standard, not the exception, for event movies!

If anyone wants to tell you that $100 million is still the standard for mega-hits, feel free to laugh in their face.  There were six $200 million movies last year.  There will be more than that this year.  There are already 250 movies over the $100 million mark.  Back in the year of The Lion King and Forrest Gump, there were a record twelve $100 million domestic films.  The next year, there were just 10.  The heat was off, no $300 million movies and the industry got a little nervous.  But there was no need – at least not from that point of view.  In 1996, there were fifteen $100 million movies… the next year, sixteen… then eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-two and last year, a regressive twenty.  

If you go back another ten years to 1984, a year in which Ghostbusters reigned and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom did what seems an impossibly light $180 million, there was a total of only twelve films that did $50 million or more.  That was when $100 million was a blockbuster and $200 million was an all-timer.  It is also when most of the box office analysts who have a sense of history made their bones and established their personal idea of box office standards.  Before that year, only Raiders, Jaws, Empire, Jedi, E.T. and Star Wars had done over $200 million.  Two $200 million movies in one year seemed like a major landmark, just as two $300 million movies should have been last year.

So should be expecting two $400 million movies in 2004?  Maybe.  It could happen this year, two years ahead of “schedule.” 

What’s the down side?

More history… Last year, Universal had four summer movies that grossed over $100 million: The Mummy Returns, Jurassic Park III, American Pie 2, The Fast & The Furious.   The four films, including P&A, cost the studio around $400 million to bring to market, all in.  They brought in around $675 million domestically, well on the way to profitability in worldwide distribution.

This summer, Sony has a summer line-up of Spider-Man, The New Guy, Enough, Mr. Deeds, Men in Black II, Stuart Little 2 and XXX, representing an investment of over $1 billion, all in.  It’s seven movies, you say?  Well, let’s eliminate the two small fish, leaving Spidey, MIB2, Stuart 2, Deeds and XXX, and the number is still imposing, about $950 million, all in.  To break even, the studio needs to generate about $675 million at the domestic box office on these five films.

And, as you may have already figured out in your head, the same $675 million that meant a $600 million profit for Universal (some of which was eaten by Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) means break-even for Sony this summer.  I am, of course, intentionally picking numbers that match.  But if anything, these numbers are more generous to Sony than not.

You already know that Sony is going to be more than half the way there on Spider-Man alone.  They had a home run.  But what if they hadn’t?  What if Spider-Man did $250 million and MIB2 did $200 million and Little, Deeds & XXX each did $100 million?  Suddenly, a studio with numbers that look pretty damned good is sweating the foreign box office numbers.  What if Spider-Man or MIB2 straight out stiffed? 

And what does Sony have to do to match Universal’s profitability from last summer?  Roughly, a billion dollar domestic summer for these five movies.  Even if Spider-Man does $400 million, that is going to be tough, unless they have a secret weapon (aka, a $150 million grosser in Enough). 

Don’t get me wrong… Spider-Man is a smash by any standard, Sony’s having a happy summer, and I’ll bet on MIB2 to pass $200 million and XXX to pass $150 million, sight unseen.  But that is also exactly what Sony is doing.  And that, my friends, is the source of concern. 

How much would you have bet on The Patriot, Hollow Man, Charlie’s Angels, Vertical Limit and The Sixth Day?  Sony and their partners were in for about $720 million on this fivesome when you include P&A.  And the result was around $415 million domestic.  That’s less than breakeven... particularly when you consider the weakness of Charlie’s Angels outside of the U.S.   Maybe a $100 million loss.  Of course, there were foreign presales and partnerships and additional studio overhead and all of that, but let’s just focus on hard numbers for the moment.

But what if the studio had spent as much on those five films as they did on this summer’s five?   They didn’t.  But a studio might.  Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cameron & Drew in a sexy TV classic, a visual epic from Martin Campbell and a major effects show with Paul Verhoeven. 

And that’s when you see a studio go under from one bad summer.  It’s not going to happen to Universal or Disney or Paramount or Warner Bros. because they are just too big and they all have TV networks to fall back upon.  There would simply be a change of leadership.  But MGM or DreamWorks or Columbia?  A $300 million or $400 million losing summer could end it in a hurry.  And I don’t want to see that.

But I’ll tell you something else… that isn’t really what I am upset about.  What worries me is this ongoing effort to shorten the life cycle of movies.  I worry because I believe in exhibition.  I worry because as much as I appreciate that movies are very expensive commodities, they are inherently more and the balance is precarious already. 

I don’t know what will happen.  The IMAX idea is interesting, though there is the lingering suspicion that full-length films in the format will cause nausea and disorientation.  A place like ArcLight, a high-end theater with high-end pricing, is interesting, though the profit margins are hard to work out.  Digital projection is the only hope for revival cinema in this country, but revival houses are the last places that can afford new projectors.   As long as marketing costs continue to grow, not for the big event films but for the average films, word-of-mouth, the thing that should be key, becomes less and less valuable.

I like progress, but I’m not sure that $100 million opening weekends and video windows four months after release are progress.

MINORITY CHANGE?:  I saw new ads for Minority Report and the blue tint that was so evident in the original trailer was not in the ad.  Did Spielberg lose the gimmick?  Are they showing the scenes that aren’t tinted?  I don’t know.  But I will try to find out today and let you know tomorrow. 

EPISODE THREE: Okay, here’s the drill… I’m going to start writing Episode Three tomorrow.  The thing is, we all know that there are things that George Lucas has to do with Episode Three in order to make Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope make sense.  How much room will there be for surprises the next time out?  How much can we figure out now?  Send in your ideas about what will have to be in Episode Three and I will try to make them a part of the E3 Project.

READER OF THE DAY:  The Former Miller writes:  “I saw Episode II this weekend, and maybe I left my Disbelief Suspension Helmet at home, but I had issues with the film. The newer episodes seem so much more a product of their time than the originals. When I saw the originals, I felt like I was in a time and place I had never seen before. The idea of having a Sci Fi space flick take place a long time ago seemed novel. The idea of ''space junk'' seemed both novel and plausible. The wardrobe and hairstyles seemed different from those I saw in magazines. In Attack of the Clones, I saw sleek, modern-looking ships, and

slender, midriff-baring Britney Spears wannabes strolling about the set. And I'm supposed to believe that Blade-Runner-meets-The-Fifth-Element-meets-Kuala-Lumpur-on-Acid Coruscant is pre-Death Star? Mmm, I don't know. While we're on the subject of Coruscant ... compared with the numerous other locales the Star Wars films have taken us to ... this one seems like an ecological impossibility - unless we presume that these humanoids don't require some sort of oxygen equivalent for survival.

The other main problem I have seems to be Natalie Portman's ... we'll call it ''character choices''. I think I've seen all her movies (as I looked her up recently on the IMDB) and something is missing from her  performances in both Star Wars flicks. I seem to recall seeing Carrie Fisher's screen test on one of these behind-the-scenes shows, and in it, I could tell exactly why they picked her. She had fire, and intelligence, and she could make the wacky things she was expected to say seem sensible. Natalie Portman had about ten times as much fire in her little finger in The Professional as she does in either of the ''Episodes''. She would make a great puppet princess ... or a great pauper hero, but as a princess hero, I'm having trouble buying her ... and who is doing her make-up? What is with that horrible pink lipstick?  While I'm at it, what the hell kind of monarchy elects a queen for two terms? Couldn't she just have chosen to appoint a new queen and make herself senator? What.  Ever.

As for the whole idea of the clones ... all I knew was the title, and I couldn't figure out where these clones were supposed to come from, or why. That par of the story was pretty cool ... as, I'm sure, will be the video game.

I didn't hate the movie, and I'm sure I'll go see the next one, too, but it was no Spider Man. When I left that one, I said, ''Finally, a good movie.'' After Episode II, it was, ''Well, I didn't hate it.''

Okay, Dave, have a super rest of the weekend. I'll get back to my piña coladas. ;)”

And this from The Mac:  “I am glad to tell you that reading you column these past few weeks and seeing you defend Lucas and the "Star Wars" franchise, Well, to quote a certain green jedi master- "Brings warm feelings to my heart."  I know that it seems to be the new in thing to do by bashing Lucas and "Star Wars" and comparing it's opening weekend B.O. to that of "Spider-Man", But you know what the thing that all of these people in the industry and the jaded movie going public seems to have forgotten is that the "Star Wars" saga is all coming out of one man's mind.  It's not some world famous series of books, a long running comic book or for that matter "The Matrix" which was dreamed up not by one man but two.  "Star Wars" is one person’s dreams, hopes, imagination and thoughts.  He isn't trying to reinvent the wheel here, because he already invented it over twenty years ago and all of these naysayers out there think that they can do it better than Mr. Lucas. 

Well, I dare them to try.  No one in the history of film or for that matter any sort of entertainment medium has ever created a piece of work that has inspired so many to create, dream, argue, debate, laugh, cry, feel, etc... You name it Mr. Lucas' series of films have done it.  I stood out in line with the group that waited patiently at Grauman's Chinese since early April and listened to debate after debate and heated conversation after very heated conversation about the merit of Lucas' new trilogy and how he screwed it up, well every single one of these people that held such contempt for what Lucas supposedly screwed up, still sat in line for six-weeks straight and big surprise came out of that midnight show with the biggest smile I've seen on anyone’s face.  "Star Wars' is like The Maltese Falcon itself, it's the stuff that our dreams our made of and I just want to thank Mr. Lucas for sharing it with all of us. 

As a projectionist, I am able to walk into the auditoriums to check our presentation and at every show that I have walked into I have seen young and old alike, men and women all with the same shocked expression of child-like glee during 90% of the film.  The film is perfectly constructed to give an audience what it needs and wants.  2hrs and 24 minutes of pure enjoyment, and every audience reacts the exact same way.  There is no reason why critics and upset fans need to bitch and moan.  If they don't like it they can go out and make their own films, but quit bagging on Lucas for fulfilling his destiny and making the films he wants to make no matter what the rest of you say. 

E ME:  Did any of you see About A Boy?  Come on… you can do it… you’ll have a really good time!  And are you all happy to over the Spider Wars hump?  Suddenly, other studios are spending money on ads again… Scooby Doo, Goldmember, Minority Report… suddenly, it’s summer.  The trio from Blue Crush is on MTV in bikinis.  Undercover Brother is chasing Foxy Cleopatra to the theater.  What’s looking good as the new ads hit?