Rival Studios Are Laughing at--Not With--Sony and ‘Cable Guy’

While the management of Sony Pictures Entertainment was gloating Monday morning--at least publicly--over the near-$20-million weekend opening of its new Jim Carrey film, “The Cable Guy,” the rest of Hollywood was snickering.

It’s hard to find any movie executive outside Sony’s Culver City studio gates that isn’t rooting for the dark comedy to tank.

Even by early afternoon Friday, the day the movie opened, Hollywood insiders were critical of “The Cable Guy’s” chances at the box office.

“Did you hear? The matinee numbers aren’t strong. It looks like it’s not going to open,” said a gleeful marketing head of a competing movie company.

“Everybody wants it to fail,” another high-ranking studio executive said Friday.

By Monday, when the final box-office figure ($19.8 million) was reported for “The Cable Guy,” which stars Carrey as a mean-spirited cable installer who terrorizes a customer, industry sources sneered that the movie hadn’t even grossed $20 million despite one of the widest openings in film history.

Sony’s collective corporate blood pressure must have gone off the charts when executives read Monday morning’s Wall Street Journal, which called the results “a disappointment for the studio that bet Jim Carrey’s track record would guarantee a bigger opening.”

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Rivals of Sony are in an unforgiving mood because they blame Mark Canton, chairman of Sony’s Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Cos., for single-handedly raising star prices to new levels when he paid Carrey $20 million to star in “The Cable Guy.” The move had a ripple effect across Hollywood as other top stars began demanding similar salaries and less-than-”A-list” actors asked for more money--driving the already-inflated cost of making movies higher.

“This movie caused a Hollywood earthquake that we’re still feeling the aftershocks of,” griped one industry executive, asking, “Do you think this will finally mean the end of Mark Canton?”

Because the film reportedly cost Sony an estimated $70 million to make and market, it will have to gross at least $75 million domestically for the studio to break even, or turn a small profit with the help of other revenue streams such as foreign box office and home video. But you don’t make a Jim Carrey film just to break even or see a small profit. His other movies, “The Mask,” “Dumb and Dumber” and the “Ace Ventura” films have all been highly profitable.

Hollywood’s irritation with Sony has deeper roots than in the “Cable Guy” controversy. One only need read the recently published, highly acclaimed “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood,” by former Premiere magazine reporters Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters, to know why Sony has long been the studio everyone loves to hate.

From the day Sony bought Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures in 1989 for $3.4 billion and paid Warner Bros. an additional half a billion to win the services of Guber and Peters, Hollywood has had a field day bashing the studio.

“Hit and Run” details the profligate spending by the producers-turned-studio moguls that ultimately led to Sony’s staggering $2.7-billion write-off and additional $510 million operating loss--considered the worst financial debacle the industry has ever known.

In giving Guber and Peters what they call “the richest deal in the entertainment industry,” the authors write, “Sony set off a round of inflation that eventually touched everyone: executives, actors, directors and agents.”

The book chronicles how Guber and Peters, in trying to jump-start the studio, continuously overpaid for talent, scripts and movies ever since dishing out $700,000 for their first “go” project, “Radio Flyer,” which ultimately cost the studio $43 million.

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Their overspending and lavish indulgences inspired downright hostility in Hollywood’s business community.

“They’re ruining the business,” was the mantra chanted in those days by rival studio heads incensed over having to overpay for material and talent to stay in the game.

One senior executive this week observed of Sony, “They dropped the A-bomb in the middle of Hollywood, obliterated everything, and they wonder why people don’t like them.”

Sony’s current management says they’ve stemmed the excesses of the Guber/Peters era, cut costs and earned an operating profit in recent quarters. But even today, a lack of respect for the company’s corporate team permeates the industry.

Hence, the “Cable Guy” bashing.

“Given what Canton did to the business, I hope it’s a flop,” said a Sony competitor, resentful that the studio chief “went outside” the Hollywood club by paying Carrey the $20 million.

Last week, rival distributors and theater owners were also up in arms when Sony sidestepped the standard industry practice of opening movies in only one theater complex in a given area. In order to increase its runs on the movie, Sony booked “The Cable Guy” in theaters a short distance from each other.

“Again, they broke the rules and people are mad at their arrogance,” the source said.

Breaking the rules and being arrogant were also what got Guber and Peters in deep trouble.

“Hit and Run” co-author Griffin said Monday that in researching the book, “it was very difficult to find friends and supporters who had positive things to say about the studio. Both on the talent and business side, there was wholesale dissatisfaction about the way Sony operated.”

The book, which has been nearly unanimously well-received by the Hollywood elite, is itself another black eye for Sony, which has been a lightning rod for controversy for the last seven years.

The simultaneous release of “Hit and Run” and “The Cable Guy” has industry insiders again laughing under their breath at Sony.

Of course, if “The Cable Guy” turns out to be a runaway hit, Sony can laugh back.