A funny thing happened at the box office this summer: Moviegoers stopped showing up. Perhaps they’re all staying home with a bad case of sequelitis.
After a May in which virtually everything went right – with “Finding Nemo,” “The Matrix Reloaded,” “X2: X-Men United,” and “Bruce Almighty” all sailing past the $200 million mark – June and July have produced nothing but disappointments. “The Hulk” opened up with $62 million, only to nose-dive 70 percent in its second weekend. “Charlie’s Angels 2” opened with $37 million – 3 million less than the original film debuted with in November 2000. This past weekend saw both “Terminator 3” and “Legally Blonde 2” perform below expectations, at $42 million and $22 million, respectively.
For Hollywood executives, all of this is obviously bad news – especially the fact that, in total box-office revenue, the summer of 2003 trails the previous summer by 5 percent, and shows no signs of making up the difference soon. But for those of us whose job it is to review movies, and to champion creativity and risk-taking in the film industry, it’s actually rather encouraging news – proof that audiences will not just accept whatever moldy goods are placed before them; proof that at some point soon, the studios are going to have to start doing things differently.
Why has the box office gone astray? I don’t think it has anything to do with quality. You’d be slightly insane to argue that “Bruce Almighty” is any better or worse than, say, “Terminator 3” or “2 Fast 2 Furious.”
They’re all polished, pre-programmed studio projects, crafted to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. They aim very low and basically hit their targets. But what “Bruce Almighty” has that the other two films don’t is at least some patina of freshness – it may be a familiar Jim Carrey comedy scenario, but at least Carrey is playing a different character, in different circumstances, than he has before. (Of course, quality does matter somewhat -“Hollywood Homicide” and “From Justin to Kelly” were both rancid efforts, and audiences ignored them accordingly.)
The problem for Hollywood is that old adage: “Everything in moderation.” Last year, the studios turned out seven sequels or remakes during the summer. By the end of August 2003, they will have turned out 17. (And the occasional nonsequels, like “The Hulk” or “The League of Extraordinary Gentleman,” seemed to have been made soley to engender future sequels.)
Watching these movies fall to the wayside, a critic can’t help but feel a bit of schadenfreude. That’s because reviewing a sequel often feels like re-doing the same homework assignment you handed in two years ago
The repetitiveness has proven exhausting. As Carl DiOrio, the box-office writer for the industry trade paper Variety, points out, Hollywood has placed moviegoers onto a kind of assembly line.
“Because the studios have put such an emphasis, weekend after weekend, on ‘event pictures’ – and because they have pushed the beginning of the summer movie season to the first weekend in May – by the time you get to July 4th, many prospective moviegoers have adopted a somewhat jaded attitude,” he explains. “Is an event film really an event film when every weekend has one?”
Watching these movies fall to the wayside, a critic can’t help but feel a bit of schadenfreude. That’s because reviewing a sequel often feels like re-doing the same homework assignment you handed in two years ago; if the failure of a “Legally Blonde 2” or a “Dumb and Dumberer” means one less sequel down the line, I’m grateful.
At the same time, though, it’s been a disappointing summer to be a critic – and not just because the product is so insistently mediocre. It’s that the water-cooler-factor this summer is nonexistent; people don’t seem interested in the movies. With the exception of Finding Nemo and maybe The Italian Job, there aren’t any “oh-you-absolutely-gotta-see-that-one” titles that have sustained interest for longer than a weekend. Indeed, most of the conversations I participate in these days are along the lines of, “You were far too kind to “The Hulk.’ “
The rest of the summer doesn’t hold much promise for the studio bean counters. “Pirates of the Caribbean” (which opened Wednesday) breathes enough new life into the pirate movie genre to make it a hit, but “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (which opened Friday) looks to be in serious trouble. It’s the sort of middling movie – like “Reign of Fire” last year or “The Princess Diaries” in 2001 – that in summers past might have been carried along on a tidal wave of audience eagerness to see as many movies as possible, an eagerness nowhere to be found right now. As for the summer’s remaining sequels: Does the prospect of “Spy Kids 3-D,” “Tomb Raider 2,” “Bad Boys 2,” or “American Wedding” (the third film in the “American Pie” series) get anyone’s heart pumping with enthusiasm?
The lessons Hollywood needs to draw from all of this are obvious – a lesson brought home most forcefully by the runaway success of “Finding Nemo” and the art-house hit “Whale Rider”: In the summertime, audiences simply want something that’s familiar in design (in “Nemo’s” case, a computer-animated comedy from Pixar), but fresh in construction (again in Nemo’s case, an inventive story set in a vast underwater world).
Hollywood has no choice but to start restoring the balance between original projects and sequels, so I suspect good news is on the horizon. But it’s distant, beyond the summer of 2004, because a whole slew of movie sequels were green-lighted at the height of franchise fever. Coming in just 12 months’ time: “Spider-Man 2,” “Blade 3,” “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” to name but a few all-too-familiar names.
The breakout success of the New Zealand drama “Whale Rider” – which ranked No. 13 at the box office last weekend, even though it played in only 209 theaters – isn’t necessarily a surprise. After the movie garnered standing ovations at last year’s Toronto and Sundance film festivals, many pundits earmarked it to become the sleeper hit of summer. It’s already crossed the $4 million mark and could easily gross upward of $20 million.
What is it about this coming-of-age story – about a young Maori girl trying to prove to her grandfather that she can lead her tribe – that’s connecting with moviegoers? I would argue that it has nothing to do with quality (even the movie’s supporters admit the screenplay is hokey and the characters are mostly one-dimensional) and everything to do with gently tweaking the very familiar.
Indeed, following the success of last year’s “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and this spring’s “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Whale Rider” suggests that indie filmmakers and distributors have finally taken a lesson from Hollywood studios – the very lesson that the Hollywood studios seem to have forgotten this summer. “Whale Rider,” with its cute kid protagonist, its easily quantifiable family conflict and its uplifting, mystical ending, is a standard emotional button-pusher from first frame to last.
Is there something slightly screwy about a movie season where the biggest art-house hit plays like the foreign remake of a Hollywood movie? Yes. But credit where credit is due: The movie feels fresh, thanks to its lush New Zealand locales, its actors’ foreign accents and its portrait of Maori tribal rituals. And at least there isn’t a “Whale Rider 2: Willy Goes to New Zealand” in production.
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(c) 2003, Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
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AP-NY-07-11-03 1137EDT
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