Hollywood marketplace snapshot: The view isn’t always pretty

It may be an honest admission that Hollywood finally has run out of ideas, but this week’s announcement that DreamWorks is developing a movie based on the View-Master couldn’t come at a more fitting moment: Brand names people have heard of -- even those associated with a simple toy -- now mean more to a film’s success than $20-million stars. The summer movie season is more than halfway over and a vacation season that started off hot -- ‘Star Trek,’ ‘The Hangover,’ ‘Up’ -- has now cooled considerably. Despite the fast start to the year’s ticket sales, seasonal returns are now up only 5% since May 1, compared with a year ago. Given how spectacularly several expensive star vehicles crashed (the smoldering wreckage is topped by Will Ferrell’s ‘Land of the Lost’ and Eddie Murphy’s ‘Imagine That’) and how even some heavily touted franchises are doing worse than their predecessors (‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,’ ‘Angels & Demons’ and ‘Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian’), a movie based on the old 3-D slide viewer might be as good a bet as anything else. The next wave of upcoming movies may improve the summer’s overall performance. Friday’s Sacha Baron Cohen comedy “Brüno” will likely open in first place, July 15’s boy wizard sequel “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” will certainly sell a ton of tickets, July 24’s guinea pig spy story “G-Force” should appeal to families and Aug. 7’s militaristic action fest “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” could attract a flood of young men. There also might be a sleeper hit or two around the corner: Aug. 7’s cooking and writing comedy “Julie & Julia” and the Aug. 14 genre thriller “District 9” among the likeliest break-outs. But even at this point, the summer is telling a number of lessons. The first: Audiences are voting with their e-mail, texts and cellphones. According to figures collected by the tracking firm Box Office Mojo, the box office gross of the average summer movie this year fell nearly 52% from its opening weekend to its second weekend--the sharpest drop-off in summer history. Those fall-offs provide the clearest evidence yet that playability -- the test of how much an audience actually likes a movie and will recommend it to their friends -- has eclipsed marketability, or how easily a movie’s concept can be sold. The summer’s most profitable release yet, Warner Bros. $35-million comedy ‘The Hangover,’ benefited most from fervent word of mouth. In its second weekend, the R-rated comedy fell just 27%, and a mere 18.5% the following week. The studio’s ‘Terminator Salvation’ opened well enough but promptly fell off a cliff, collapsing more than 61% in its second weekend, while Fox’s ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ nose-dived even worse than General Motors stock, plunging 69% in its second weekend.... READ THE REST