Hollywood’s Year-End Hustle : Sequels and Blockbusters at the Gate to Top Off Record-Breaking Year

With the typically lucrative holiday moviegoing season about to begin this weekend, Hollywood is looking to cap a year of record-level business. If all goes as analysts are predicting, the holiday season will push 1993 above the all-time high of $5.03 billion in tickets sold, set in 1989.

“The volume of movies this season is quite extraordinary,” said Steve Gilula, president of the Samuel Goldwyn Theater Group. “The studios are betting that there will be continued strong business based on the performance of movies in the summer and fall.”

Exhibitors count this weekend as the beginning of the holiday season, with Friday’s opening of “The Three Musketeers” and the Al Pacino drama “Carlito’s Way.” In years past, this has been the weekend that Walt Disney Pictures has opened such major holiday entries as “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin.”

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Between now and the end of the year an average of three major releases open every week, making the competition for screens that much tougher. The premium placed on screens in the season is so acute that almost as soon as Paramount Pictures decided not to release “Intersection,” starring Richard Gere and Sharon Stone, the “gap” was filled immediately by Warner Bros. Warner pulled up “Grumpy Old Men,” starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, from its scheduled spring date. “Grumpy” is now going into theaters on Dec. 3.

“If a film doesn’t work, then it will be off the screens before the Christmas vacation period, one of the best playing times of the year,” said 20th Century Fox executive vice president Tom Sherak, whose studio will open the Robin Williams comedy “Mrs. Doubtfire” the day before Thanksgiving.

This year three of the major studios only have one holiday entry apiece: Fox has “Mrs. Doubtfire”; TriStar, the Jonathan Demme AIDS drama “Philadelphia”; and MGM/UA, the screen version of the Broadway play “Six Degrees of Separation.”

“It isn’t optimum to have only one movie during the season,” Sherak admitted, “but that’s the way it worked out. We’re going with one picture because it is the one we think will play strongly from Thanksgiving to Christmas.” Fox, which has not had a strong year at the box office and whose most recent film, “The Beverly Hillbillies,” attracted only modest business, has a lot riding on “Doubtfire.”

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But it looks as if the odds are in Fox’s favor since the comedy that features Williams in drag is the hands-down choice of industry insiders to be the hit of the season.

“It’s a funnier movie than ‘Tootsie,’ ” said Michael Patrick, the chairman of Georgia-based Carmike Theaters, with screens in 25 states. “The only problem is that people at the screening I saw laughed so hard, I missed a lot of the dialogue.”

The last eight weekends of the year--pre-Thanksgiving Day to New Year’s--are considered the movie world’s “prime time.” Not only does the holiday season usually produce a box-office bonanza, it’s also the time when many of the year’s prestige films open to qualify for Academy Award consideration.

Beginning Nov. 19, with the opening of “Addams Family Values,” the sequel to the 1991, $113.5-million film, 15 major national releases are scheduled. That’s three more than the holiday season a year ago.

In addition, approximately 10 more films, with subjects ranging from love triangles and concentration camps to AIDS, will open in limited release before the year-end and expand in January.

That allows the more specialized and serious films a period of time for word of mouth to spread leading up to Oscar nomination time in February. This group of films, which this year includes Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” and Demme’s “Philadelphia,” are also poised to take advantage of one of Hollywood’s prime promotional tools--the Golden Globe Award nominations made by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., which will be announced Dec. 23.

In addition to “Mrs. Doubtfire,” the key Thanksgiving weekend releases also include Warner Bros.’ “A Perfect World,” starring Kevin Costner and directed by Clint Eastwood (who also appears in the film); Columbia Pictures’ release of Castle Rock Entertainment’s “Josh and S.A.M.”; an animated film from Spielberg, “We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story”; and a filmed version of the classic ballet “The Nutcracker,” featuring Macaulay Culkin.

The next “wave” of holiday fare arrives on Dec. 10. Among those titles will be “Sister Act 2,” starring Whoopi Goldberg; “Geronimo: An American Legend,” with Jason Patric, Robert Duvall and Gene Hackman; and “Wayne’s World 2.”

The following weekend, Dec. 17, sees the arrival of the Western “Tombstone,” with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer; Alan Pakula’s highly anticipated “The Pelican Brief,” starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington; and Universal’s dog comedy sequel “Beethoven’s 2nd.”

Around mid-December, the select release films begin to arrive with frequency. One of the earlier ones will be MGM’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” starring Stockard Channing and Will Smith.

“Schindler’s List,” set in a Nazi concentration camp, opens on Dec. 15, followed by “Philadelphia,” starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, on Dec. 22.

Among films bowing on Christmas Day are Oliver Stone’s “Heaven and Earth” and Paramount’s “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” with Mary Steenburgen and Johnny Depp.

The German-language “Far Away So Close” from director Wim Wenders is also due in December, but no opening date is set. Likewise, the French production “Germinal” from director Claude Berri is due during the month.