A Big Whiff of Summer Has Studios Hungry

Hollywood studios have great expectations for the summer movie season after the first two event films to be released--”Twister” and “Mission: Impossible”--combined for $220 million at the box office so far in May.

“Mission: Impossible,” starring Tom Cruise, shattered records in its first six days, taking in $74,906,420 in domestic ticket sales. That figure eclipsed the previous six-day leader, “Jurassic Park,” which did $74.1 million in its initial six days in 1993. (Both films benefited from Tuesday evening preview screenings.) “Batman Forever” grossed $72.2 million in its first six days last June.

Paramount Pictures was able to accomplish this feat because it mounted a massive marketing campaign while engineering the widest release of all time--between 4,500 and 5,000 prints in 3,012 theater complexes. By comparison, “Jurassic Park” opened in 2,404 theaters (on 3,530 prints) while “Batman Forever” debuted in 2,842 theaters (the number of prints was unavailable).

Meanwhile, “Mission: Impossible” also shattered four-day Memorial Day box-office records, taking in $56.8 million compared to $37.2 million for “The Flintstones” during the 1994 Memorial Day holiday.

But as the weeks go by, studio officials say, the competition will intensify as more and more big-budget action or comedy movies compete for a finite number of nationwide screens.

Between June 7 and July 3, major studios will release “The Rock,” starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage; “Eraser,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; “The Nutty Professor,” starring Eddie Murphy; “The Cable Guy,” with Jim Carrey; the highly anticipated sci-fi movie “Independence Day”; and the latest Disney animated film, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

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“The problem with all these movies coming out is that it’s impossible to get as many screens for them as ‘Mission: Impossible’ and ‘Twister’ were able to get,” said Tom Sherak, senior vice president at Twentieth Century Fox.

Sherak said he would love to release “Independence Day” on the same number of screens that featured “Mission: Impossible,” but the competition will be too fierce around the Fourth of July.

“I can’t do it because of ‘Eraser,’ ‘The Rock,’ ‘The Cable Guy’ and ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ ” he said.

Sherak said Fox expects to open “Independence Day” very wide, but all the studios will face the problem of too many films in the marketplace by midsummer.

Barry London, vice chairman of Paramount’s motion picture group, also said that the deeper into the summer studios go, the fewer screens will be available.

“Trying to project where [‘Mission: Impossible’] is going after only six days is impossible,” London said. “We’re at a level nobody has been at before--especially during the month of May.”

London added that the box-office take for Memorial Day is all the more remarkable since Monday was not a holiday in Canada, where box-office figures are included in the domestic tally.

Rob Friedman, who heads marketing at Warner Bros., noted that there are more than 26,000 movie screens in America, and that should help relieve some of the competition. But, he added: “The guy who is underperforming is going to have greater difficulty in holding onto theaters.”