A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : FILM COMMENT : Don’t Cry, You’ll Lose Sight of the Dice

In the curious new math of Hollywood, the film industry will spend about $2 billion this summer to earn back about $2 billion. If that sounds like a Las Vegas crapshoot, you’re not far wrong. The winners will be taking home the money of the losers, after the house gets its cut.

The gamble isn’t even as good as it looks. The $2 billion spent will be real dollars, including the costs of making, marketing and distributing the more than 50 major movies scheduled for release, while the $2-billion gate will be split about 50/50 with theater owners.

But before you tear up that check to your favorite TV ministry and redirect your alms to the destitute lads at Warner Bros., Universal, et al., consider that there are other markets to be harvested later--foreign, video and pay-TV--and that humiliation at the craps table may be just what these guys need. The more confused and desperate they get, the better movies are likely to become.

It is when the creative powers in Hollywood are most confident, when they are certain they know what the public wants, that the quality and variety of their product hit bottom. For nearly 16 summers, since Steven Spielberg scored the big jackpot with “Jaws” in 1975, the formula has been fairly simple: Put big stars who appeal to young audiences in settings that feature either heavy action or dazzling special effects, then repeat it.

By the mid-’80s, it was hard to find a single film aimed at adult audiences in an entire summer schedule. When 20th Century Fox released John Huston’s “Prizzi’s Honor” in the summer of 1985, it was seen by others as an admission that the studio’s production department had come up short and was merely using that black comedy as mid-season filler.

When Disney’s two surprise 1989 summer hits--”Dead Poets Society” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”--demonstrated a lucrative market for both drama and family movies, executives at other studios began to question the wisdom of overloading the summer with expensive action, adventure and science-fiction films. And the success last year of such “cheap” long shots as “Ghost” and “Pretty Woman” (a spring release that played through summer) totally undermined the concept.

The result is a summer of real adventure, for both the studios and moviegoers. The ’91 season, now upon us, has fewer than a dozen action or adventure films on its schedule, including one--”Hudson Hawk”--that was dead on arrival in theaters last week. Only two of the action-adventures appear to have any real chance at becoming blockbusters--the Kevin Costner edition of “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Judgment Day, indeed. It would be hard to find a better example of the thinking that has dominated Hollywood for the past decade than “Terminator 2.” The first movie was a surprise hit when it was released in the fall of 1984, a fresh sci-fi story executed by a talented new director (James Cameron) with an actor (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who was still regarded as some sort of speech-impeded grinning pectoral oddity on the star horizon. “Terminator” didn’t make that much money, but it didn’t cost much either.

Seven years later, after the actor has become Hollywood’s most popular star and the director one of its freest spenders, Schwarzenegger and Cameron are reunited in one of the biggest crapshoots in film history. With marketing costs added in, the tab for “Terminator 2” may exceed $100 million before the first ticket is sold. Seven-come-eleven, roll ‘em.

The box-office returns on “Terminator 2” and “Robin Hood” will attract media attention all summer, but the real news will be in the performances of the lower-profile pictures on the schedule. The great bulk of the lineup is made up of comedies and dramas, more than 20 each, and how audiences respond to them may dictate the creative mood in Hollywood for many seasons to come.

It doesn’t take long for the studios to recycle successful ideas; “Ghost” is spiritually reincarnated in the upcoming “The Butcher’s Wife,” and the “Home Alone” theme gets replayed in “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.” If “Thelma & Louise,” which opened well last week, hangs in against the coming competition, look for a rash of female-buddy movies next summer. If “Soapdish” and “Delirious,” a pair of spoofs of daytime TV, are hits, there will be another wave of media farces. Every successful movie is “honored” by repetition.

But the subject range in this summer of Hollywood’s discontent seems too widespread to promise any kind of valid referendum at the box office, and that could be the best news of all. As long as the people who decide which movies get made can’t figure out which ones should get made, there is the chance that a few good ones will get made.