Dear Hollywood ...Forget the stars, hire Transformers and don't forget the women — here are the 10 things every movie mogul should keep in mind when it comes to the summer of 2010.
The 2009 summer-movie season began the first weekend of May with the prequel X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and is ending before Labor Day with Halloween 2, a sequel to a remake. That pretty much sums up the artistic ambitions of summer movies. Familiarity breeds contempt only among critics; the mass audience keeps paying for more of the same. They may see the "new" movies while wearing 3-D goggles, but the product is the same: cinematic Pringles. At the end of a busy season we present the 10 lessons these movies teach — the dictates Hollywood lives by and the reasons movies are so ... similar to other movies. But don't blame Hollywood bosses; blame the audiences. So conservative are moviegoers, they punish stars who try something different. In Funny People, Adam Sandler went deadly serious — and into the box-office commode. Sacha Baron Cohen was nearly lynched for putting an oily edge on his Brüno character. (Baron Cohen is not a star; Borat is.) For once, comedy actresses, Sandra Bullock and Katherine Heigl, sold more tickets than the big comedy actors — by sticking to the basics of funny romance.
Ticket sales have been up this year, and so were some of the films: Up, for instance. Others showed the only kind of ingenuity that pays off: twisting genre conventions into new forms. That what Neill Blomkamp, the season's big discovery, did with the sci-fi District 9, and what Quentin Tarantino did to the let's-kill-Hitler war-movie plot in Inglourious Basterds. Both films found large audiences, which is nice. But a flat-out original idea, brilliantly imagined? Save that dream for Oscar season. Just kidding!
1. Skip the StarsFrom the movies' infancy, when Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin won the world's affection, Hollywood's most precious capital was the face on the screen. That was Rule No. 1 for nearly 90 years — and now it's broken. We're in the poststar era. To see how the movies do without big names, look no further than the top-lined actors in this summer's hits: Chris Pine (Star Trek), Bradley Cooper (The Hangover), Ed Asner (Up). Now consider the names on two summer flopperoos: Will Ferrell (Land of the Lost) and Adam Sandler (Funny People). What draw audiences today are stories with a touch of fantasy and some cool visual effects. Studio bosses know this; that's why they're so reluctant to pay stars $20 million or more per picture. One actor who got that kind of money this summer: Tom Hanks, whose Angels & Demons survived the shrugs of critics and audiences to earn nearly $500 million worldwide.
2. Get AnimatedWalt Disney found honor and profit in feature-length cartoons, and so have his heirs. In 2008, four animated films finished in the top 10; this year there'll be at least three. Disney/Pixar's starless, near flawless Up is the third biggest domestic moneymaker of the season, and Blue Sky/Fox's Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is sixth. (Monsters vs Aliens, from the other big animation studio, DreamWorks, was champ of the presummer box office, earning nearly $200 million in North America and another $180 million in foreign markets.) CGI rules in the big live-action films too. Whether drawing an old guy with balloons or making giant toys fight, computer-nerd wizards are the new Hollywood royalty.
3. Spend Money to Make MoneyBack in 1997 it was big news when James Cameron spent $200 million on his sinking-ship movie; then Titanic grossed $1.8 billion worldwide, and all was forgiven. Today Hollywood sees a $200 million budget as an acceptable gamble for a picture with blockbuster hopes. As often as not, the bet pays off. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen cost that much, but has earned $826 million worldwide; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came in at $250 million and has taken in $868 million. The one semifizzle among superpricey films: Terminator Salvation, whose $370 million worldwide gross means that, after costs, it will just about make back its $200 million budget.
Five other films in the summer's top 10 domestic winners — Up, Star Trek, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Angels & Demons — had budgets of at least $150 million. Their sponsors must have been pleased, since each of the five earned more than $350 million worldwide. The only real bargains were the two comedies, The Hangover ($35 million budget, $268 million domestic gross) and Sandra Bullock's The Proposal ($40 million, $159 million domestic gross), and the animated feature Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Costing $90 million, about half the budget of Up, it has registered a foreign gross nearly six times that of the Pixar film. That's money well spent.
4. Ignore the GrownupsDon't adults have money to see films, or do they give it all to their kids? They're the forgotten summer demographic: people old enough to run for Congress. They got meager movie servings over the past few months. The Johnny Depp Public Enemies waved vaguely in their direction, with '30s couture and mature amour, but at heart it was another crime drama, however pensive and broody. The only film aimed squarely at upmarket boomers was Julie & Julia, about a flutey-voiced chef from an old PBS series. The movie is doing nicely, thanks in large measure to high senior attendance. On J&J's opening day, fully half the audience was over 50. Theater owners should have sold boeuf bourguignon at the concession stand — and maybe had a pledge drive to boot.
5. But Don't Forget the WomenWhat do women want? If Freud were an industry analyst, he'd say they want to see movies about emotionally frustrated career gals who get remedial lessons in love from down-to-earth guys. That was the fate awaiting Sandra Bullock in The Proposal and Katherine Heigl in The Ugly Truth ($83 million domestic gross, so far). These inexpensive films outgrossed pricier comedies starring Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler and Sacha Baron Cohen. And though they weren't exactly classics, they had the tonic effect of proving there's still a market for femme comedies.
So did Julie & Julia, with Meryl Streep as the mistress of French cuisine, Julia Child. At 60, and after two international smashes — The Devil Wears Prada ($327 million worldwide) and Mamma Mia! ($609 million worldwide) — Streep is arguably the top female star in movies. If there were still stars. (See Lesson 1.) Having recently played a singing mom, a stinging nun and Anna Wintour, Streep should go even farther and take over gigantic franchises. Why not cast her as Optimus Prime? Or the queen prawn in the District 9 sequel? That woman can do anything.
6. Out-Apatow Judd ApatowNot since John Hughes' mid-'80s heyday of teen movies has a writer-producer made so many crowd-pleasing comedies as Apatow. For a while the hits just kept on coming: the two films he directed (The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and the 493 (actually, seven) other comedies he's produced in the past two years. But this summer the box-office take of his movies shriveled to flop size. Year One, a prehysterical farce with Jack Black and Michael Cera, tanked, and Funny People, his heartfelt tribute to stand-up comics, underperformed despite the presence of two Apatow stars, Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen.
But the template was there for anyone to use. The Hangover, an R-rated guy-bonding comedy with characters straight from the Apatow oeuvre, was the surprise hit of the summer. (I Love You, Man, with Apatow regulars Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, earned $71 million this spring.) It may well be that the Judd-eye knight will retake the empire, but, as Hughes earlier proved, comedy is as susceptible to audience whim as any other genre. And nobody's funny forever.
7. Send a Get-Well Card to IndiesTen years ago, a little company released a horror fakeumentary called The Blair Witch Project. Shot for just $60,000 and smartly promoted online, the film grossed $141 million and was the sensation of summer 1999. Since then, the so-called indies have launched small-budget movies as hot-weather palate-cleansers between the courses of big-studio Big Macs. That strategy paid off handsomely with the comedies My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Little Miss Sunshine and the documentaries Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins. Even the occasional foreign film, like La vie en rose, could find a warm summer reception.
Not so this season. The docs Food, Inc. and The Cove were full of entertainment value and nutrition, but they've languished at the box office. The Hurt Locker, critically acclaimed and with enough stuff that blows up to keep the action-film crowd alert, had to run a mine field just to reach $10 million in its first two months of release. The summer's most popular indie, the mega-ingratiating (500) Days of Summer, has earned more than $22 million (on a $7.5 million budget), but it's no Juno. The only indie-type movie to become a flat-out hit is the South African apartheid morality play District 9, which cleverly masqueraded as a sci-fi alien thriller under Peter Jackson's imprimatur. As for foreign-language films, they made no noise at all — until late August, when Quentin Tarantino stormed the box office with Inglourious Basterds, whose dialogue is mostly in French and German.
8. Send in the DinosaursMovies have loved the big prehistoric galoots ever since Winsor McCay animated his Gertie nearly a century ago, and Jurassic Park earned Hollywood's raptor attention when it topped the box office in 1993. This summer, prehistoric beasties played roles in four films released in one five-week stretch: Night at the Museum 2, Up, Land of the Lost and Year One. The last two bombed, suggesting audiences had tired of tyrannosaurs. But no. Ice Age 3 amassed nearly $200 million in North America and an epochal $600 million abroad, more than any other movie this year — indeed, more than last year's megahit The Dark Knight grossed in foreign markets. That made the Fox cartoon feature the midbudget bonanza of 2009, and it guaranteed another cycle of comedies about dinosaur droppings — and another year spent praying for a meteor to wipe them out.
9. Make Sequels and PrequelsHollywood can read numbers, and they say that audiences favor the familiar. Seven of the top 10 summer films were either sequels (Transformers 2, Harry Potter 6, Ice Age 3, Night at the Museum 2 and the Da Vinci Code successor Angels & Demons) or prequels (Star Trek, Wolverine). Only the Pixar fantasy Up and the two comedies, The Hangover and The Proposal, were in any way new ideas. And when an action movie, of whatever provenance, opens big, there's immediate talk of franchising: a sequel to District 9, a prequel to Inglourious Basterds. Right now, some screenwriter is surely trying to figure how to reconvene the Hangover gang or pry Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds apart so that one of them can make another reluctant proposal.
It's all part of the industry's grand scheme to create or sustain properties that, every few years, will earn a bundle — essentially, to take the guesswork out of moviemaking. Also the ornery inspiration, and the naysaying of critics. Michael Bay's Transformers movies usually get scathing reviews, but Hollywood wishes there were 500 Bays of summer.
10. Wow the Fans on Friday
In the old days — like, until this summer — a movie studio judged the success of its big pictures by how much they grossed on the opening weekend. But in the age of Twitter, electronic word-of-mouth is immediate, as early moviegoers tweet their opinions on a film to followers who retweet them, and so on. Instant-messaging can make or break a film within 24 hours. At any rate, something viral happened to Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen's followup to Borat. Its opening-day gross was a burly $14.4 million, which that Saturday plunged an abysmal 40%. Somebody got out the word — stinker — and did it quick, possibly in 140 characters. The movie's opening-weekend total was $30 million, and it's taken six weeks to earn its second $30 million. Moral: The fate of a movie that might have been two years in the making can now be determined in a couple of hours on a Friday night. That's comics in the Twitter age.
