CHECKBOOK COUNT ON SUMMER FILMS

Last May, moments before the start of a press screening of “Top Gun” on the Paramount Pictures lot, studio publicists led in a group of about 40 young teen-age girls who quickly filled the remaining empty seats in front of the small theater. It didn’t take long to find out why.

The girls were unnaturally restrained and well-behaved during the opening credits, but when Tom Cruise flashed his blinding world- class smile for the first of what would be dozens of times, the young audience was cut to sighs, then swoons, then shrieks.

Since then, “Top Gun” has gone on to become the year’s most popular movie. It has earned more than $125 million, $30 million more than its nearest summer rival, “Karate Kid II,” and made Cruise’s smile one of the most solid assets in Hollywood.

In the old days, Paramount would have treated Cruise’s teeth the way Fox treated Betty Grable’s legs, by taking out a $1-million insurance policy with Lloyds of London. But the beneficiary in this case would be the Disney studio, which steps up this fall with Cruise’s next picture, “The Color of Money” (co-featuring the Hall of Fame eyes of Paul Newman.)

“Top Gun” took a drubbing from most critics, as did last summer’s champ, “Rambo: First Blood Part II.” But most critics aren’t driven to the theaters by hormones. Analysts can talk about the impact of VCRs and pay cable on the movie business. The success of “Top Gun” suggests a stronger link with estrogen.

Among studios, Paramount also wins the summer. Besides “Top Gun,” it released “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” John Hughes’ latest assault on adulthood. “Ferris” will have grossed about $60 million by the end of the week.

Paramount has to be disappointed with the receipts from “Heartburn” ($21 million) and “Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives” ($18 million). But when you consider that “Hearburn” was made for adult moviegoers, who are generally dormant this time of year, and that “Friday the 13th” is the sixth entry in perhaps the worst movie series in history . . . not bad.

According to Art Murphy, Daily Variety’s reliable box-office trend watcher, the summer of ’86 will end up doing about as much business as the summer of ‘85, despite having only one megahit.

Murphy predicts that the final summer ’86 tally will be around $1.4 billion, a figure that will rank it in the top five of all time. That may not be cheering news to exhibitors, in the midst of booms in both videocassette rentals and theater building. Records are relative. Although ticket prices have certainly shown a consistent increase, the actual number of tickets sold has hovered at about 1 billion for the last 25 years.

Most studio people discount the impact VCRs and videocassettes are having on film-going habits; they may be right. But you can’t be in two places at one time. There are more than 22,000 video stores in the country, many of them doing big business on weekends. Where else might all those movie shoppers go?

The major studios made a stronger effort this summer to woo older film-goers into theaters, and they had some luck.

Last year, “Prizzi’s Honor” was the only adult-themed film in the top 15 spots on the box-office chart. This year, there were five, including “Ruthless People,” “Legal Eagles,” “Running Scared,” “About Last Night . . . “ and “Heartburn.”

Measuring box-office receipts against expectations is an industrial illness in Hollywood. Among the films this summer that are generally regarded as losers are “Poltergeist II: The Other Side,” “Legal Eagles” and “Cobra.” Between them, they have taken in more than $130 million.

“Cobra,” the summer’s most critically savaged release, was labeled a bomb because it did only $48 million with Sylvester Stallone. The imponderable way of looking at it is that more than 10 million people ignored the critics and bought a ticket!

There were enough real losers without picking on Stallone. “Howard the Duck” laid the most celebrated egg, whether you measured it against expectations or receipts. The $35-million film, one of the summer’s preseason box-office favorites, was playing on double bills by the second weekend and will finish the summer (and its run) with less than $15 million in grosses.

Then there was “Pirates,” the long-awaited, quickly gone high-seas adventure that Roman Polanski first started working on nearly 10 years ago. The film reportedly cost nearly $40 million to make and returned about $1 million in film rentals to its American distributor, Cannon Films. The ship in “Pirates,” which is being converted into a museum on the French Riviera, cost about $8 million.

Although Paramount always has summer contenders, there were signs of a shifting balance of box-office power. Warner Bros. and Universal, two busy giants, had seven of the Top 10 box-office draws last summer. This year, each had one. Universal had the No. 7 “Legal Eagles,” Warner Bros. had the No. 8 “Cobra.”

Orion had its best summer ever. It released only two films and one, “Haunted Honeymoon,” was a bomb. But Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School,” the season’s sleeper, is pushing the $80-million mark.

Tri-Star had two solid hits with “Short Circuit” and “About Last Night . . . “ (a small miracle, considering the studio buckled under to timid advertising outlets and dropped the play title “Sexual Perversity in Chicago”) and will end up with a $100-million summer.

It was also a watershed season for Disney. “Ruthless People” has grossed nearly $60 million and “The Great Mouse Detective” did $24 million (another small miracle, considering that the studio exchanged the terrific title “Basil of Baker Street” for this one).

But the most interesting summer story of all belongs to 20th Century Fox. If the studio could have flopped its release schedule and started the summer with “Aliens” and “The Fly,” it might have given Paramount a run for the top spot. “Aliens” has grossed almost $65 million, despite a mid-July release and a running time (2 hours, 17 minutes) that held exhibitors to one less than the normal five showings per day.

According to Fox distribution and marketing President Tom Sherak, the studio had no choice in the order it released its summer films. “Aliens” and “The Fly” were winter productions that were released as soon as they were finished.

The mystery is what happened to Fox’s other movies. No one had a more promising summer lineup going in, but it immediately dished up three bombs with Harry Winer’s “SpaceCamp,” John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China” and Marshall Brickman’s “The Manhattan Project.”

The appeal of “Big Trouble” was the movie equivalent of a dog whistle; it hit somewhere outside the range of human perception. But the others suffered fates they didn’t seem to deserve.

“SpaceCamp,” an adventure about a group of teen-agers who accidentally end up aboard an orbiting shuttle, was released in a year when people are in no mood for shuttle movies. In fact, it was released the day President Reagan was presented with the final report on the January shuttle disaster. And “The Manhattan Project” was sent out with some of the year’s best reviews, only to find empty houses.

Despite the audience research and cautious packaging that guides most major studio decisions these days, the failure or success of some movies defies analysis. Somehow, millions of people come to the same conclusion about a movie, no matter what the critics or the advertising tells them.

Maybe it’s in the genes, Sherak says. Or the hormones.