It’s been a year-and-a-half between pictures for the normally prolific Adam Sandler.  (He’ll be catching up with the release of Punch-Drunk Love later this year.)  The last time we saw Adam, he was getting his ass burned by Little Nicky, the only real box office car wreck of his movie-starring career.  The film grossed less than $40 million domestic and you can’t say the audiences didn’t see it coming… the film opened to just $16 million. 

Obviously, the audience decided that it was safe to pay dollars to go see Mr. Deeds, even if the potential Winona Ryder audience was taken out of Sony’s pocket, put in a police car and driven away from the box office.  An estimated $37.6 million weekend follows a weaker-than-$37.6 million opening weekends for franchise machines Disney Animation, Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg.  What does this say about the future of mankind?   Not much.  My guess is that both of last weekend’s major releases will end up outgrossing (box office only) Sandler.  But opening gets more and more important and teens get more and more important and one can only shake his head and wonder.

Ready for a series of Scooby Doo’s “smash success was a hoax” stories?  You won’t see them, even though the film has gone through back-to-back drops of more than 50 percent.  A $54 million start generated lots of ink about the film being one of the summer’s big hits.  But it looks like $150 million will end up being a reach here at home.  With foreign box office of half of that likely, all the profit will come at the video store.  That profit isn’t chicken feed and it does support a sequel, but not another $80 million for a sequel. 

Assuming a 20 percent box office drop for the sequel and a 10 percent increase in costs, status quo suggests that the first $40 million or so in video/DVD profit would go to paying back the production and P&A on the theatrical release.  That would still likely leave $20 - $40 million profit overall.  Unless Scooby generates shockingly strong video sales/rentals, expect WB to try to cut the below-the-line production price tag on Scooby Too by about $20 million. 

On Thursday, The Sum of All Fears became the first film of 2002 to pass the $100 million mark after opening with less than $45 million.  Setting the bottom for the domestic eight-figure feat at $31 million, look for Minority Report and Lilo & Stitch to be next to join the club.   Last year, four movies (one spring, two summer and one holiday) managed to pass $100 million after starting under $30 million.  There is no such example on the horizon right now, though The Bourne Identity is holding well and has an outside shot.  The way things look now, there will be seven films that will hit $100 million and were released prior to the Fourth of July weekend… last year, there were eight. 

To address the stories about some sort of movie-going trend again… trying to keep it less confusing for certain valley-based journalist friends… pre-July-4 releases eventually grossing over $100 million domestic… seven this year, eight last year… as of the weekend before July 4… this year’s seven have outgrossed last year’s eight by $122 million. 

The difference between last year’s Top Three as of the pre-July-4 weekend and this year’s… $250.7 million.  Spider-Man, Attack of the Clones & Ice Age versus Shrek, The Mummy Returns and Pearl Harbor.  Spider-Man versus Shrek alone?  $167 million. 

It’s the movies, stupid.

L.A. STORIES, PT. ONE:  It was an interesting weekend, floating through a couple unexpected splashes of Los Angeles-ism.  The first event was Friday night’s The Hollywood Reporter’s 31^st Annual Key Art Awards.  I call it that because it was obviously driven into the heads of everyone with a microphone that this was never just the Key Art Awards, but always The Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards or preferably The Hollywood Reporter’s 31^st Annual Key Art Awards. 

I really enjoyed the event.  It’s kind of like The Academy Awards for people who still work for a living.  Okay, that’s not fair to The Oscars.   But in a little mid-Wilshire theater, a thousand or so industry marketing people, the folks who design one-sheets and standees and trailers and TV ads, the execs whose companies pay for them, and everyone in between, gather to celebrate and honor their own.  The event is intimate, self-depreciating, loving, vicious and unusually real. 

Even as an outsider… and while a lot of the names were familiar, I deal almost exclusively with the publicity departments, not the marketing types… I quickly felt like I knew the playing field.  By the time I found myself wandering around the after party, I could have chatted up 20 percent of the room, with some idea of who was who.  Strange.  The Oscars play to the television audience more than the industry.  The occasional truly inside joke gets uncomfortable laughter more than anything else.  Here, everyone seemed to be in agreement about the companies and marketing departments that are in trouble, who pushed the rules of fair play hardest and what they all love and hate about their world.  When someone mentioned the French being in Hollywood… “for now,” the audience was right on the joke.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that Peter Adee, the recently deposed marketing chief at Universal, hosted and charmed the crowd while never attacking his former home base. 

(Late Note:  Little did I know it during the show… God knows who did know… but less than 48 hours after the show, Peter Adee would be announced as MGM’s president of worldwide marketing.  Unfortunately for MGM and Adee, the problem wasn’t the marketing… the problem was the movies.  The one area where Adee can have a serious impact is on the UA side, where Bing Ray has shown terrific taste in selecting films and the Coppola product has probably been underexploited.   The studio has a Bond movie coming… A Guy Thing has been pushed repeatedly, suggesting trouble and UA has a Ron Shelton thriller called Dark Blue… who knows?  I congratulate Adee and sincerely wish him good luck.  He deserves a more stable base from which to work.)

The awards themselves were also interesting.  The process that I go through each year when I start to consider the awards-to-come (you know, within a sane range of the actual awards) was done for me, as the nominees and winners offered range and clarity about last year’s marketing efforts.  Sitting there, I was reminded of the great campaigns of 2001.   Tomb Raider, Shrek, Monsters, Inc., Ocean’s Eleven, Pearl Harbor, The Fast & The Furious, the print campaign for Planet of the Apes, Moulin Rouge, Jimmy Neutron, Harry Potter (“& The Sorcerer’s Stone” here… “& The Philosopher’s Stone” overseas) and Lord of The Rings all showed up in incarnation after incarnation.  The Animal and Blow also got a lot of attention, though I’m not 100 percent sure why. 

What fascinated me most was the classic question… do you judge the art for art’s sake or do you just the art based on its effectiveness?   In other words, does the extraordinary teaser trailer for A.I., which not only won Best Teaser Trailer, but Audio/Visual Best of Show as well, deserve to win, even though it didn’t put butts in seats? 

Don’t get caught up in a “then you would just give the awards to the highest grosser” argument.  My feelings are a bit more subtle than that.  Did the A.I. teaser trailer make me want to see the movie more than, say, the teaser trailer for Lord of the Rings?   I love the Ocean’s Eleven big-red-11 teaser poster, but did that entice me the way the great Pearl Harbor 40s style posters did or the amazing Tomb Raider close ups of Angelina Jolie?  (I forgot how amazing those images were… I recall driving next to buses and really getting caught up looking at the threads of hair hanging in front of Jolie’s face or the sweat on her brow… really effective stuff, even for a dumb movie.)

There were very few nominees of which I disapproved.  And there were very few winners that I wasn’t happy enough with to applaud with sincere enthusiasm.  There was a certain thrill when Startup.com won not only Best Comedy Poster (bizarre enough designation for a doc, but made odder by the inclusion of the movie Novocaine, an unfunny comedy… ha ha ha).  But it won Print Best of Show to boot.  Artisan also got an award for the very sexy poster for Center of the World (were it only that the movie was half as sexy). 

I felt bad, however, for the Planet of the Apes teaser poster, which I thought was powerful and quite beautiful… my favorite single poster of last year.  It lost to Ocean’s Eleven.  I felt that The Fast & The Furious TV campaign, nominated quite a bit, deserved some love.  I don’t think there was a more effective campaign last year, taking the title from obscurity to hit with remarkable acuity.  Lord of the Rings blew me away again, making me desperately interested in seeing the film on a big screen as soon as – if ever – possible.  I was reminded how great those Pearl Harbor posters were and how Jimmy Neutron’s in-theater materials drew my interest when I had none and how relentless DreamWorks was with variations on the Shrek campaign, keeping the flame burning. 

Most of all, I was struck by the lack of an award for Best Overall Campaign.  To me, that’s the killer, which should be awarded to the studio marketing chief and/or any lieutenants that he or she feels deserves the nod, plus recognition for all of the companies involved.  It would be a complicated category to judge and I guess that asking each studio to submit only two or three campaigns would become a political nightmare… maybe a select committee picks one from each studio… I don’t know.  But I was aching for the award.  Was it Harry Potter’s massive, worldwide campaign, complete with subway stops and malls transformed into Minority Report-type advertising spaces the best campaign?  Or was it Memento’s subtle magic in transforming a distributor-free film into a modest indie hit?  Or The Fast & The Furious?  Or Shrek or Moulin Rouge or Tomb Raider or Monster’s Inc. or Pearl Harbor or Ocean’s Eleven or Artisan’s Center of the World and their dirty website or, or, or…

Anyway, it was yet another reminder of what I keep saying… movies are marketing right now.  I’ve never given these guys enough credit, mostly because I don’t really know them.  But I will pay more attention now.

To see THR’s story on the event, click here and to get an eye-full of the nominees in each category, click here.

P.S.:  Had I ever seen the redband (R-rated) trailer for Not Another Teen Movie, I would have actually wanted to see the movie.  It contains one of the best tag lines ever, in that classic baritone announce voice, “If you loved Scary Movie… Who gives a shit?!?!” 

L.A. STORIES, PT. TWO:  Saturday night was another truly L.A. evening.  First, the birthday party of a former beauty queen and still-current beauty on the roof of a downtown office building that also house Cicada.  Lovely.  It’s rare that downtown Los Angeles after dark feels like anything other than Jesus and the lepers in King of Kings.  On Saturday night, it felt like New York… something right out of the roof sequence of Radio Days.  It turns out that the space was actually the building owner’s apartment for decades… the bedroom is still a bedroom. 

The crowd was also interesting… a mixture of cultures, dressed in many cases for the Moulin Rouge theme, all of age, all happy to chat… a smart L.A. crowd… oy.  And the spectacular beauty of the birthday girl, her girlfriend/sidekick and the mother of one and the parental figure of the other… it was all of a lovely palette, little seen here.  Serious beauties, sticking with it, not giving in or giving up… friends in and out of the industry… a perfect, breezy night.

Then there was the valley.  Yes, I left the party with the group I was traveling with.  Some of us are more hyper than others.  The party in the valley was the polar opposite of the one downtown.  Oversized security guys, maintaining a perimeter around the Van Nuys office building… serious about that guest list.  I wondered whether I was walking into one of those really raunchy L.A. parties.  No.  Once we got by the guy with the mic up his sleeve, the elevator doors opened into a spandex fog. 

One member four party said it best, “Every loser in Los Angeles is here.”  It’s a funny thing.  In Los Angeles, you deal with a lot of categories.  This could have been a “rich old guy and self-exploiting young woman” party.  It could have been a porno-based party.  It could have been a hip room with a few imposing elders.  But it was none of the above.  It was sleazy and cheesy.  Every bad haircut and toupee guy from the places where industry guys trawl was there.  The women seemed to be imported from a last-minute search of the local malls.  It turned out that the bevy of beauties dancing together were working… they were there as a promotion for a modeling agency.   The great looking girl with the really ugly guy was working him for plastic surgery… an activity far more popular with the men in the room than the women.   The bartenders were more interesting than anyone at the party… which is not all that unusual here in L.A.  Still, it was fugly.

JUST SAYING:  I love Wes Anderson’s films, but he is responsible for the existence of both Pumpkin and Tadpole and  their attempts to link to his success by using moody 60s songs on their soundtracks and I’m not sure that I can forgive him.

SICK:  It’s not gross, but it is sick.  A story from Sky.com can be found here.

GOOD-E!:   E! Online’s Josh Grossberg wrote a good story on DreamWorks’ early acquisition of two traditionally Disney release slots for animation, November 19 and June 18, both in 2004.  Besides being ballsy, the November announcement has got to be more irritating to Disney than the summer announcement.   2004 is the first Nov/Dec in three years without a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movie slotted in close by.   Plus, they have a Pixar film helmed by Brad Bird, The Incredibles, to release… that looks like a hot seller, far more so than Finding Nemo, another waterlogged flick, after Atlantis went under.  Read J.G.’s story here.

READER OF THE DAY:  The Harbor Master writes:  “I don't want to get into a little pissy fight with a past ROTD because I know that's not what you're here for, but when Not a Former Yankee Outfielder mentioned that he/she was told by a theatre that "the computerized machine selling [Spike Lee's movie's tickets] had crashed," but he was told he could buy a child's ticket to a Disney film instead and go to the Spike Lee movie....gimme a freakin' break.

As a manager of a movie theatre, let me tear apart his/her lie with some questions:

1) Question: So you're saying that a theatre had a computerized ticketing machine that only sold tickets to certain movies (for instance, one machine for Spike Lee movies, another for Disney movies, one for action movies, etc.)? 

Answer: That's ridiculous.  One machine sells to all movies, so that statement of yours is false.

2) Question: So you're saying that the theatre told you that instead of buying an adult ticket for yourself, you could go ahead and buy a child's ticket instead?

Answer:  Sure, we movie theatres love to sell child tickets to adults.  I mean, why charge the higher price?  It's not like theatres want to make money.  So that statement of yours is false.

3) Question: So you specifically remember this incident--enough to write and complain about it to an internet columnist--yet you just happen to leave out the title of the Spike Lee movie itself?

Answer:  Sure is convenient, huh?  Very specific incident of a racist theatre, but instead of naming the movie, you just throw out the "controversial" director's name (who has just happened to complain about this to the press) and say you don't remember the movie.  Whatever.  You're just trying to stir up the pot.

I realize this whole thing is petty, but again, as a theatre manager, I get so sick of this "racist" argument that is attributed to theatres.   Many times when we have a film with a predominately African-American audience that happens to sell out opening night, there's always a few customers who get upset, wondering why we don't have it in a bigger theatre, why didn't we get more prints of it, why we didn't cancel other movies to get more seats for it, etc., etc., etc.  My response: why WOULDN'T we put it in the best possible position?  Again, theatres are there to make money--we don't make money by selling out theatres prematurely, or by putting big movies in small houses and turning away lots of customers.

(pant, pant, pant)  Okay, my rant is done.  I apologize for the novel, and I know you won't print this, but his argument pissed me off.  I get so sick of hearing knee-jerk comments like his suggesting that all theatres are racist and are trying to ruin Spike Lee's career.  I had to vent to someone.  :-)

E ME:  Vented.  What were your favorite ads, trailers, posters and standees of 2001 and why?