Hollywood’s Star Vehicles Sputter at the Christmas Box Office : Movies: ‘Blaze,’ ‘We’re No Angels’ and ‘Family Business’ opened with high holiday hopes. Despite their six bankable male leads, the films have fallen flat.

In a year where box-office records have been posted almost weekly, Hollywood’s runaway movie machine has finally sputtered. On Friday--the 11th day before Christmas--the major studios sent three star vehicles into wide national release, and they fell like an overweight sleigh without reindeer.

“Family Business,” “We’re No Angels” and “Blaze,” a threesome of male-oriented films featuring no fewer than six major stars, managed to gross less than $6 million on a total of 3,349 screens. On the same weekend a year ago, “Rain Man” grossed $7 million on just 1,248 screens.

Overall, business was down 25% from a week earlier. Even “Back to the Future, Part II” and “Harlem Nights,” which opened strongly just a few weeks ago, are fading quickly. And the fourth new release last weekend, the video-arcade comedy “The Wizard” with TV teen star Fred Savage, had a dismal opening.

Industry analysts attribute some of the box-office slide to the cold weather that blanketed much of the country and to the pressure of stretch-run Christmas shopping. There’s also the fact that the year’s hottest movie--”Batman”--has recently reopened in video stores in every neighborhood in America, giving the new local multiplexes some serious stay-at-home competition.

But the poor performance of the new releases--particularly the three targeted for adult audiences--cannot be written off completely to wind-chill or shopping-crisis factors. Analysts say that the figures posted by “Family Business,” which stars Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick; “We’re No Angels,” starring Sean Penn and Robert De Niro; and “Blaze,” starring Paul Newman, are so slight that the films now have no chance of becoming hits.

Besides the mixed reviews generated by the films, their poor grosses raise other questions: Were they released at the right time of the year? Just how bankable are actors who are 15 years or more older than the prime moviegoing audience?

“I think it has a lot to do with the demographics of who’s going to movies,” said one casting director who asked to remain anonymous. “The primary purchaser in the film market right now is 12 to 25 years old. Names like Hoffman and De Niro don’t mean anything to a 16-year-old kid. He wants to see ‘Batman,’ and he doesn’t care who’s under the mask.”

Information gathered by Cinemascore, which conducts exit polls at movie theaters asking people to grade films on their opening night, reveals that an average of 67% of the audiences polled for “Family Business” and “We’re No Angels” was over 25. More significantly, 71% of the audience for “Blaze” was over 35.

“That’s a killer,” Cinemascore President Ed Mintz said. “The over-35 crowd represents an age group that just does not go to movies in any kind of number.”

For Newman, who was cast against type as the late Louisiana Gov. Earl K. Long in “Blaze,” this represents the superstar’s second major flop in recent months. “Fat Man and Little Boy,” about the creation of the atomic bomb, opened nationally in October and did less than $4 million before disappearing from the market.

To find Newman’s last box-office success, you have to go back to the 1986 “The Color of Money,” which--like “Rain Man”--teamed an aging superstar with current box-office powerhouse Tom Cruise.

For many exhibitors, these films looked golden just a few months back.

“Three months ago, everybody thought this was going to be an incredible Christmas,” said Gary Meyer, executive vice president of the Landmark theater chain. “It seemed clear that the studios were attempting to make more sophisticated films, not broad Hollywood films. But if you’re making a film for a more adult audience, you have to have a better-quality movie. That’s not to say these are bad films, but they aren’t the kind of films that have gotten across-the-board rave reviews.”

In addition to mixed reviews from critics, those three movies were given Cinemascore audience grades in the B- range, “which is goodby, Charlie,” Mintz said. “Usually, 90% of audiences give a film an A or a B, which makes sense because they chose to see the movie in the first place. If a film receives less than a B, it means that it’s not going to be around long.”

In “Family Business,” Connery, Hoffman and Broderick--three actors who, as reviews have pointed out, bear no resemblance to one another--are a three-generation family involved in familial thievery. In the buddy-buddy comedy “We’re No Angels,” Penn and De Niro, seen in most of their films as tough guys, take a turn as plodding escaped cons hiding out in a quaint picturesque town disguised as Catholic priests.

Mintz points out that such actors as Hoffman, Connery and Newman have solid followings with older females, who constitute a fairly steady film audience. But he says their current films are targeted mostly at male audiences, and that the older actors are miscast.

Entertainment analyst Tom Adams with Paul Kagan Associates puts less stock in the belief that the films released last weekend are unsuccessful films. “The holiday season is one of the peak box-office times, but it’s very much of a crap shoot,” he said. “Theater attendance is affected by the weather, what day Christmas falls on, how many weekends there are left for shopping and how exciting the movies on videocassette are.

“That’s a factor not often included, but it seems fairly self-evident that with ‘Batman,’ ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ and ‘Bambi’--three of the biggest titles of all time that have all come out in the past few months--you’re losing theater audiences to home video. That may be something we’ve never seen before.”

Although video rental figures for last weekend are not available yet, Alexander & Associates reports that for the week ending Dec. 11, there were 84.9 million video rentals, compared to only 67.2 million a year earlier.

“The films that opened last weekend are going to make it one way or another,” Adams said. “If a big-name star is not a hook in the movie theater, than it’s almost always a hook in video, in syndicated TV markets and in overseas sales. It’s not so much the consumer as the video retailer, who says, ‘Oh, a Paul Newman movie. I have to have six of them.’ So it’s still a game of hiring big talent, even after a bad weekend.”

Newman, Hoffman, De Niro and Connery are not the only big-name actors to suffer in theaters this Christmas. TV superstar Roseanne Barr and leading lady Meryl Streep opened two weeks ago in the ballyhooed “She-Devil” to a disappointing $3.5 million; last weekend the film failed to make the Top 10.

“Back to the Future, Part II” featuring frowzy-haired Michael J. Fox has fallen off an average of 45% every week since it opened a month ago. The film has grossed about $75 million so far, but will fall well short of its mega-hit $200-million predecessor. Even Eddie Murphy failed to perform as expected in “Harlem Nights,” which, after a strong start, has almost run its course with $49 million in earnings.

The box office will become even more crowded Friday when Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss elbow their way in with director Steven Spielberg’s “Always,” and Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell are due out in the buddy-cop action film “Tango and Cash.” In limited release, Tom Cruise joins the fray today in Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July.”

Meanwhile, leading the box office are “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” which brings back Chevy Chase as the beloved Clark Griswold, and “The War of the Roses,” teaming up three hot commodities: Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito. What has kept those Hollywood heavyweights from toppling?

“Chevy Chase has a younger male audience who follows him,” Cinemascore’s Mintz said. “In this case, he’s in a movie that his fans like. It’s funny and he gives them what they expect. It’s probably the only plain old-fashioned comedy out there right now. ‘The War of the Roses,’ on the other hand, is a surprise. But it’s the same great team that people paid lots of money to see in ‘Romancing the Stone.’ ”

“The War of the Roses” has also been buoyed by mostly strong reviews. Most analysts are quick to point out that quality is still the best ingredient in a successful movie.

“Star quality is not necessarily going to make people want to see a movie,” Entertainment Data Vice President Philip Garfinkle said. “It’s a combination of the actor and the role. It’s always been the actor and the role.”