NEW YORK - Coming off the hottest August and a record-breaking Labor Day weekend in terms of box-office business, Hollywood is turning its dollar-sign-emblazoned eyes to the fall season with an almost giddy "let-the-good-times-continue-to-roll" optimism.
Fueled by the unexpected hits "The Sixth Sense" and "The Blair Witch Project," which helped drive the summer movie season that began in early May to an unprecedented height in terms of dollars spent by moviegoers - an unheard-of 11 movies topped $100 million - the industry is looking at the kind of robust release schedule for the next 3 1/2 months that could make 1999 the highest-box-office-grossing calendar year in history. Executives kicking back in Hollywood suites are saying that, on paper at least, this final fall/holiday season of the century is looking like a winner - both in terms of potential commercial hits and in appealing Oscar-worthy entries.
Boding particularly well for healthy fall box office is the fact that the biggest summer movies - like "The Phantom Menace" and "Austin Powers" - scored without featuring the industry's veteran stars that can "open" movies because fans will flock to theaters the first weekend of release to see their favorite stars in practically anything. Other than Tom Cruise (who, as several studio executives point out, was in a Stanley Kubrick "art" film rather than a typical Tom Cruise movie) and such newer stars as Will Smith and Adam Sandler, most of Hollywood's biggest stars sat out the summer. Instead, such box-office draws as Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, to a lesser degree, Nicolas Cage and Kevin Costner all have high-profile fall/holiday movies on tap.
Practically every studio and independent executive interviewed predicted a winning combination of strong box office and the potential of several top Oscar nominations for Tom Hanks's "The Green Mile," a mystical three-hour prison epic based on the Stephen King series of novellas and directed by Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption"), to be released Dec. 17. That same pre-holiday Friday, "Bicentennial Man," starring Robin Williams as a robot yearning to be human, is considered a sure hit family film (if not a heavyweight best-picture Oscar contender). Hanks will also be back as the voice of Woody in the computer-animated sequel "Toy Story 2," scheduled for Thanksgiving weekend. Film executives say it's the third "can't miss" box-office bet for the holidays.
On top of promising star-studded family-oriented fare, the industry is in a good position to cater to moviegoers' current predilection for psychological horror/occult dramas/
ghost stories. Executives point out that, rather than having to scramble to put into production for release at least 18 months from now to capitalize on audience tastes, the fall schedule is serendipitously rife with films in the "Blair Witch"/"Sixth Sense" mode. (Just last Friday, "Stir of Echoes" and "Stigmata" opened.)
Even executives at rival studios, for example, see a big hit taking shape in Tim ("Batman") Burton's updated treatment of Washington Irving's 18th-century ghost-horror classic, "Sleepy Hollow," starring Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, who is on the trail of the ghostly headless horseman. And Schwarzenegger will be battling the devil on the eve of the millennium in the special-effects-laden horror thriller, "End of Days," which executives say should at least open to big numbers over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend.
A year-round business
Last year's intriguing and commercially successful flip-flop of more serious summer movies and more lightweight fall movies has also finally convinced Hollywood that the business is year-round. Tom Sherak, chairman of the domestic film group at 20th Century Fox, said, "We're in a 52-week-a-year business. We've been saying it for years, but now everyone really believes it: If you've got the right movie, you can release it any week of the year and it will find its audience and do well at the box office."
Serious, thought-provoking fare like "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Truman Show" scored last year in the midst of the usually silly summer movie season, while silly movies such as "Rush Hour" and "The Waterboy" chalked up $100 million-plus grosses amid the serious dramas of the pre-holiday fall period (mid-September through early November). Jeff Blake, president of Sony Pictures Releasing, isn't shy about trying to cash in on that new dynamic.
"This season we have our Martin Lawrence cop comedy, 'Blue Streak,' coming out on the same mid-September Friday that 'Rush Hour' came out last year," he said. "We're definitely looking for that same audience, which also includes 'The Waterboy' crowd. We don't think last year was a fluke; we see it as a trend. Just because the kids are back in school, that doesn't mean that all of a sudden everyone in the country wants to see dark, edgy dramas. I think the folks at Universal are thinking the same way, because they're releasing the broad-appeal Kevin Costner baseball movie, 'For Love of the Game,' the same day we're releasing 'Blue Streak.' Five years ago, these two movies would've been positioned as typical summer season fare."
Adding to the infectious optimism rampant in the studio suites, Hollywood also has a more diverse slate of movies compared with the last several years, according to not just major studio executives but also the heads of the independent distributors.
Mark Gill, president of the Los Angeles division of Miramax, the Disney-owned "independent" that always seems to come up with at least one prestige Oscar-nominated movie every year, said, "It looks like the major studios have more Oscar contenders this fall and holiday than they did last year. Even the movies that have the big stars are Oscar-type films this year, rather than just movies geared to make a lot of money. Harrison Ford in 'Random Hearts' - not exactly your typical Harrison Ford movie - and Jim Carrey in Milos Forman's 'Man on the Moon' - those are far more serious, Oscar-type movies than we're used to seeing from those stars."
(Of course, it should be noted that at this time last year, almost every studio executive and independent head was pegging "Beloved" and "Meet Joe Black" as the kind of studio fare that was sure to compete with "Saving Private Ryan" for best picture; on the flip side, not even Miramax executives were talking up the Oscar chances of a little movie they had opening in December, called "Shakespeare in Love.")
Mark Urman, president of Lions Gate Releasing, the American independent distributor of last year's "Gods and Monsters" and "Affliction," added, "Anytime you have a major studio like Disney releasing a David Lynch film and Warner Bros. releasing the latest movie from the writer-director David O. Russell, who did 'Flirting With Disaster' and 'Spanking the Monkey,' you know it's a year that Hollywood is taking more chances with edgier films that are usually more associated with independents."
On top of Lynch's "The Straight Story" and Russell's "Three Kings," there are unusually dark films coming from the studios. "Fight Club," starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton, is due out in mid-October from Fox, and it's the kind of film the indies would covet. Even Fox's Sherak says, "It's a movie that we know will have a real tough time breaking out to become a mainstream player in the marketplace. I don't even think it has much of a chance at a best-picture nomination. It's just too dark, too hard."
Aimed at Oscar
David Tuckerman, executive vice president at New Line, a division of Warner Bros., echoes other executives when he says, "The studios - rather than the independents - have a lot of the important films that spell Oscar coming out." Among those, according to a consensus of executives from both the studios and the independents, are: "The Insider," starring Al Pacino as a "60 Minutes" producer caught between a rock and a hard place; "Angela's Ashes," from the Frank McCourt memoir and directed by Alan Parker; "The Hurricane," with Norman Jewison directing Denzel Washington as the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter; Ang Lee's Civil War-era Western, "Ride With the Devil"; "Girl, Interrupted"; Tim Robbins's "Cradle Will Rock"; Neil Jordan's "The End of the Affair"; and Martin Scorsese's "Bringing Out the Dead." (Two of the broader-appeal best-picture contenders that executives named were "The Green Mile," and "The Talented Mr. Ripley," with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow.)
But that doesn't mean the shelves at the independents are barren. Amir Malin, president of Artisan Entertainment, which scored with "The Blair Witch Project," says, "We have films from Roman Polanski, Atom Egoyan, and Steven Soderbergh coming up, so we like our position for fall."
Among the "divisional" independents, Miramax (a division of Disney) has "The Cider House Rules" and Jane Campion's "Holy Smoke," New Line (a division of Warner Bros.) has "Magnolia" and USA Films (part of Barry Diller's new entertainment company) has "Being John Malkovich." Kevin Smith's controversial religious comedy, "Dogma," something of a hot potato, will almost certainly go out sometime in November through a true independent, possibly Lions Gate.
The only potentially negative wrinkle for the holiday season is that this is the one year out of every seven on which Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve fall on Fridays (which usually means dampened Friday-evening box office on two key holiday weekends). Also, Hollywood isn't quite sure how "millennium madness" will affect box office.
All studios - other than Disney, with its "Fantasia 2000" extravaganza - are simply ignoring the whole millennium situation. Eddie Egan, executive vice president of marketing at Universal Pictures, said, "While there might be a dropoff in moviegoing in general on the evening of Dec. 31, if we thought there would be a big negative impact on business beyond that, we certainly wouldn't be releasing three of our most important movies of the year - 'Snow Falling on Cedars,' 'Man on the Moon,' and 'The Hurricane' - on Dec. 22, 25 and 29."
Added Sony's Blake, "Sure, for the three or four hours leading up to midnight on the 31st we'll probably see a big drop in ticket sales. But the week leading up to the 31st will have about it a party-festive atmosphere, and there's nothing to suggest that such an atmosphere isn't conducive to moviegoing. We're releasing our big, broad-appeal comedy, 'Hanging Up,' on Christmas Day. As for the folks who are going off to the equator right after Christmas, hey, we'll just have to muddle through without them."
