Now, There Are Bigger Sharks in the Water Every Summer

Sitting in his office on a hot day in July, Joe Roth was brooding about summer--the summer of 1997.

“You’ve got ‘Lost World,’ ‘Batman and Robin’ and ‘Speed 2,’ ” the chairman of Walt Disney Studios says, barely pausing for breath as he goes along. “Then there’s ‘Alien 4,’ ‘Starship Troopers,’ ‘Men in Black.’ ”

When he stops for a second, you try to help him by throwing out a title. “No, no, I think I got ‘em all,” he says. “There’s the Harrison Ford film, ‘Air Force One,’ and ‘Face Off,’ ‘The Fifth Element’ and ‘Titanic.’

“And who knows about the two volcano movies? Even if only one of them ends up in the summer, you’ve got 12 movies with an average negative cost of $100 million aimed at basically the same demographic--young men under 25--all competing for the same 12 weeks of summer.”

Roth says the film he’d normally put out in July, an action film called “Con Air,” is now slated for March. “It’s just too crowded. They’re going to eat each other alive.”

Roth isn’t the only doomsayer out there. Facing the prospect of a traffic jam of escapist fantasies, other studio executives are using phrases like “blood bath” and “insanity.” With so many potential blockbusters jockeying for position, look for next year to be the Endless Summer, a big-bang moviegoing season that begins as early as March and lasts past Labor Day.

With film production booming and the quest for $100-million blockbusters never-ending, it’s no surprise that the peak moviegoing months of summer have become more crowded each year. But what’s really striking is how early Hollywood’s Summer Games have begun. It’s only August, but most studios are already staking out key release dates, preparing marketing campaigns and securing soundtrack deals.

“The Lost World,” Steven Spielberg’s much-anticipated sequel to “Jurassic Park,” doesn’t start shooting until next month, but producers booked lab time at Industrial Light & Magic, the digital-effects powerhouse, last January. Tie-ins for toy merchandising have already been made--Universal, the studio releasing “Lost World,” recently held a fashion show for potential product licensees of prototype apparel from the film. And 20th Century Fox’s “Volcano” just started shooting last month (its unofficial ad line: “L.A. Blows”), but filmmakers have already sent footage to the studio’s marketing department for a teaser trailer that could run during World Series telecasts.

“We’re all thinking 18 months to two years ahead--in the movie business you have to see that far ahead,” says Buffy Shutt, president of marketing at Universal Pictures. “Movies take a long time to make and have to open at the right time, so you can’t stockpile your product.”

But it’s never too early to rev up the hype machine. “We’re already starting to tantalize exhibitors with what we’ve got for next summer,” says Tom Sherak, Fox’s senior executive vice president of marketing and distribution. “I’m starting to whisper in their ear--’ “Speed 2” is coming.’ And you know what? They’re already asking, ‘When’s “Independence Day II” coming?’ ”

And how does Sherak reply? “I tell them what any good salesman says--it can’t come a minute too soon.”

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The Endless Summer began on June 20, 1975, with “Jaws.” Released on 750 screens simultaneously across the country, it was the first major-studio film promoted through the use of national TV advertising. In the past, studios had platformed movies, opening them in selected theaters, then expanding the number of screens as interest in the film built. But with TV ads airing nationwide, the emphasis quickly shifted from word-of-mouth momentum to opening-weekend hoopla.

In the 1980s, both the movies and the marketplace got bigger, as a boom in multiplex theaters paralleled the rise of mass audience summer action and fantasy films. In 1975, there were 15,000 theater screens in America. Today, there are 28,000, allowing films like “Independence Day” to play on nearly 3,000 screens simultaneously.

In Hollywood, you follow the money, and the big money comes from summer moviegoing. Thirteen of the Top 15-grossing films of all time opened in the summer. With kids out of school, eager for thrills, studios don’t have to rely on weekends for peak business. As top action producer Jerry Bruckheimer puts it: “In the summer, every night is a Saturday night.”

At the time of “Jaws,” summer moviegoing accounted for roughly 32% of the year’s business. Today for a studio with a summer hit, it can represent 60% of the year’s business.

That percentage has nearly doubled, in part, because summer itself has expanded. Until the late 1970s, with East Coast colleges in session until late June, the biggest summer films didn’t arrive until the weeks preceding the Fourth of July. But in 1977, “Star Wars” opened in 35 theaters on Memorial Day weekend and was such a sensation that it was in 1,000 theaters before the end of June.

As competition for release dates increased, summer began even earlier. This year, Warner Bros. opened “Twister” on May 10, largely to give it a 12-day window before the arrival of “Mission: Impossible,” which had been moved up from its initial May 28 release date.

Next year, the release-date skirmishes will be even more fierce. So far, “Lost World” has Memorial Day to itself, but two films have already staked out the July 4 weekend--Sony’s “Starship Troopers” and Fox’s “Speed 2.”

The more you study the high-stakes gamesmanship of summer movies, the more it resembles a familiar quadrennial ritual--the presidential primary season. Everything is won or lost on one night or opening weekend. Primaries are stacked up one after the other, just like summer releases. Negative media buzz can derail a candidate or destroy a movie (especially with the media concentrating its firepower on the front-runner or highest-budget film). Political ads, like movie trailers, appeal to emotion, not intellect, rarely giving an accurate portrayal of the real product. As a result, the candidates, like summer movies, aim for the lowest common denominator--because in Washington, as in Hollywood, the game is about winning.

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The battle for pole position in next summer’s box-office derby began in earnest on July 16. While most movie pundits were still buzzing about “Independence Day,” Universal Pictures took out a full-page ad in Variety announcing that “Dante’s Peak,” then in the early stages of filming, would open on March 7, 1997. While the ad’s tag line, “The Pressure is Building,” refers to the volcano film’s explosive subject matter, it sent a calculated message to 20th Century Fox, which is racing to complete a volcano movie of its own, titled “Volcano.”

The message: Try to beat us. The ad sent a shock wave of anxiety through the Fox executive ranks. In information-hungry Hollywood, phones were ringing at dawn. Was Universal bluffing? Could they really make that release date? And could “Volcano” realistically beat them? Even today, when you visit the “Volcano” set, its producers nervously avoid questions about their schedule, saying studio executives have ordered total silence.

If Fox wants to beat “Dante’s Peak,” it has reason to worry. The Universal film began shooting nearly six weeks before “Volcano,” which isn’t slated to wrap until late October. To beat “Peak” into the theaters with a late-February release date, “Volcano” would have to race through a 13-to 15-week post-production schedule, a perilously short time frame for a film with more than 200 digital-effects shots.

“Peak’s” March 7 date puts Fox into another bind. The first of the studio’s much-ballyhooed “Star Wars” re-releases is set for Presidents’ Day weekend. It’s hard to imagine that the studio would risk aggravating George Lucas (who has yet to make a deal for his lucrative prequel “Star Wars” series) by cutting into any “Star Wars” business with one of its own big-event films--unless “Star Wars” could be moved up into late January.

Fox’s Sherak won’t reveal his strategy except to say that he considers both “Star Wars” and “Volcano” major studio priorities. “It’s wrong to rush a movie just to make a date,” he says. “We’re going to wait until we see ‘Volcano’ and then decide where it works best.”

But how much does it matter which volcano film is first? Sherak recalls that three consecutive films about age transformation flopped--it was the fourth film in the cycle, “Big,” a 1984 Fox film, that succeeded. But a dozen years later, times have changed--and the stakes are higher. With the volcano films’ steep budgets--roughly $95 million and about $70 million for “Volcano”--the media horse-race comparisons will be never-ending.

“It’s going to be tough if you’re Volcano Film No. 2,” says Art Murphy, the Hollywood Reporter’s veteran box-office analyst. “If the first one is a dud, it’ll be hurt because people don’t want to go by the same traffic accident twice. And if the first one’s a hit, it may take some of the excitement and anticipation away from the second one. There’ll be a standard of comparison that wasn’t there for the first one.”

What makes the volcano movie scramble so intriguing is that it suggests a radical transformation in the summer ground rules. After all, volcanoes are like dinosaurs, tornadoes and alien invaders--they’re the kind of thrill-park ride movies that belong to summer. But 1997 could be the year global warming hits Hollywood, when summer begins before spring break. In addition to the possible March arrival of “Dante’s Peak,” Disney’s big action movie “Con Air” is set for March while Sony’s “Congo”-style thriller “Anaconda” is due in April.

Normally, the studios wouldn’t risk losing a big chunk of box-office potential by putting out a big-bang movie at a time when kids are still locked up in algebra class. But summer has become a victim of its own success. Eager to capitalize on the global marketplace, studios have increased film production, especially films with a built-in global appeal--in short, expensive, special-effects-driven summer movies.

But now there are too many of them for summer to handle. With so many films competing for the same audience, marketing costs have skyrocketed out of control. The costs of marketing for this summer’s studio films averaged roughly $20 million, up nearly 15% from last year’s estimates. And with a new potential blockbuster hitting the theaters nearly every week, your film has 48 hours to make a splash--either you’re the windshield or you’re the bug.

“If your movie’s out in the spring or fall, you have a box-office ceiling of roughly $60 million each week,” explains one studio executive. “But you’re only competing against a couple of films, and they’re probably not going after your audience. But in summer, where you might have a box-office ceiling of $110 million a week, there’s six or eight other movies out there--and half of them are going after the same audience as you.”

For every winner like “Independence Day,” there are expensive losers like “Dragonheart,” “The Phantom” and “Striptease” that get steamrollered by stronger competitors. Even good movies get hurt. Fox’s “Courage Under Fire” got rave reviews and opened strongly, but in only its second week of release, while No. 3 on the box-office charts, it actually lost 117 theater screens. Sony’s “Multiplicity” also had good reviews but quickly got lost in the crush of new films.

“Summer is not an orderly, rational environment--it’s a playing field that’s really a minefield,” says Sean Daniel, who served as president of Universal Pictures before becoming a successful producer. “To protect your film, you need secrecy, agility and smarts. Because if you don’t have the goods, you can really lose--each summer you see a lot of bodies left on the field.”

To earn a seat at the summer-movie roulette table, filmmakers have learned to play by new rules. Five-month post-production schedules, once considered the norm for big digital-effects films, have been cut in half. Squads of editors are dispatched to cut a movie, tag-team style, often while it’s still being shot. Sound editors mix the film on multiple stages. The race is on.

“With ‘Days of Thunder,’ we were in the theaters four weeks after we got our last shot,” producer Bruckheimer recalls. “With ‘The Rock,’ we had four top editors on the film, each of them working on a different section, some of it while we were still shooting.”

When Paramount agreed last July to finance “Escape From L.A.,” its filmmakers guaranteed it could be ready for summer. By the time they were done filming this spring, they only had 16 weeks of post-production, despite the presence of 211 digital-effects shots. “Everything was geared to making our date,” producer Debra Hill says. “We only had 10 weeks of pre-production, we had no cover sets, we shot Friday and Saturday morning into Christmas and New Year’s Eve.”

As recently as two weeks ago, Hill kept the color lab open over the weekend to complete the film’s final effects shots. “We even cut out some footage because we didn’t have time to make the effects work properly,” she says. “Basically, we didn’t even preview the film because it wasn’t ready.”

Is Hill complaining? “No way,” she says. “You make a few compromises, but everyone’s thrilled to be out in the summer--why else would you give up your life just to get a movie done?”

What every filmmaker wants is a window of opportunity, a “clean” weekend where, as Fox’s Sherak puts it, “the biggest part of your audience is available to see your movie.” If a formidable competitor moves onto your date, the choice is simple: Fight or run--or bluff.

“It’s like a chess game,” Bruckheimer says. “Everyone wants a date to themselves. With ‘Crimson Tide’ we got hurt because ‘Die Hard 3’ came out right on our heels. We’d set a date and then they’d move up and we’d have to move again.”

And why did Fox’s “Die Hard With a Vengeance” keep moving up? “We didn’t want them to be alone in the market for two weeks,” Sherak says. “We were afraid they’d build up too much momentum. But by the time they went to May 12, we couldn’t move back either. ‘Braveheart’ had planted its flag on May 24.”

Everyone remembers the bad buzz and scathing reviews that sank “Last Action Hero.” But a key reason for the film’s demise was Sony’s disastrous insistence on sticking to its June 18 release date. Many loyal Arnold Schwarzenegger fans might still have sampled the film in its second weekend, if only it hadn’t been thrown into the path of a juggernaut--the opening of “Jurassic Park.”

Moving off a crowded summer date doesn’t necessarily save a film from being crushed. For several months this spring, both Universal’s “The Nutty Professor” and MGM’s “Kingpin” had planted their flags on the same date--June 26. When “Professor” began getting great buzz, MGM backed off, moving its film back a month. It still opened poorly. Sony stuck to its guns with “Multiplicity,” releasing it in mid-July, despite fierce competition. It got flattened too.

Not all the maneuvering is entirely scientific. Asked why “Professor” opened on June 26, producer Brian Grazer confessed: “I’m superstitious. We’d opened ‘Apollo 13’ on the same date. If it worked once, I thought it might work again.” Harrison Ford’s “Air Force One” is slated for an Aug. 1 release next year, in part because that’s a lucky date for Ford--it’s when his hit “The Fugitive” was released.

It’s a giant board game, part musical chairs, part chicken. If even one film moves off its date, everything will change. According to filmmakers, a choice release date can have a huge impact on box-office success. In 1994, after some great preview screenings, Fox moved its August film, a little-noted thriller called “Speed,” up to June 10, where it became a runaway hit.

“If we’d gone in August, we wouldn’t have done anywhere near the same box office that we did,” producer Mark Gordon contends. “When you have a hit film, coming out early in the summer is like hitting the jackpot.”

This year, when “The Rock” had through-the-roof screenings, Disney instantly moved the film up a month to early June, when it opened strongly. Last year, Universal moved “Apollo 13” up from its original Christmas slot to late June, where the patriotic space adventure become a big hit. But not all films belong in summer. Producer Grazer is still unhappy about the fate of his 1992 Tom Cruise film, “Far and Away,” which he says now-departed Universal execs wrongly insisted on releasing on Memorial Day.

“It was a perfect example of where a summer release date hurt a film,” Grazer says. “The subject matter--the Irish accents, the period setting--just wasn’t right for an escapist movie. But the studio had this macho thing about staking out their big summer date with a Tom Cruise film and it backfired.”

With so much at stake, studio hands admit they don’t sleep easily. “It’s agony trying to pick the right date,” Sherak says. “You lie awake at night, worrying. When we open a summer movie, I don’t sleep well until the weekend is over.”

With “Independence Day” ruling the roost, Sherak has caught up on his sleep. When the movie opened, the Fox executive heralded its success by flying a huge banner at the studio entrance, updating the box-office numbers daily. “The guy who puts up the banners was exhausted,” Sherak says. “He finally came to me and said, ‘Mr. Sherak, are we going to have to do this the whole summer?’ ”

Of course, next summer could be different. Who knows what could go wrong: “Volcano” could end up losing the volcano race. “Speed 2” is filming on water, just like, ahem, “Waterworld.” “Alien 4’s” French director doesn’t speak English yet.

In Hollywood’s Endless Summer, your worries begin early.

“I’m already looking for a great adult comedy, like ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ ” Sherak says. “We could make a killing with something like that next summer. For now, we’ve planted our ‘Speed 2’ flag on July 4. But if something goes awry, we’ll send someone out, pick up the flag and move it somewhere else. That’s what you try to do in the summer--stay one step ahead of the other guy.”

* TWIN PEAKS

Next year’s hottest race may be between rival lava-laden thrillers “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano.” See Monday’s Calendar.

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The ‘Jaws’ of Next Summer?

“The Lost World”--Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” sequel.

“Batman and Robin”--George Clooney (Batman) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Mr. Freeze) join the franchise.

“Alien 4: Resurrection”: Sigourney Weaver returns, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

“Face Off”: John Woo directs Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in a futuristic thriller.

“Starship Troopers”: Paul Verhoeven directs an epic about giant spiders.

“Hercules”: Disney’s animated entry.

“Contact”: Robert Zemeckis directs Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey searching for extraterrestrial life.

“Speed 2”: Jason Patric replaces Keanu Reeves and a boat replaces a bus.

“Titanic”: Bill Paxton, Kate Winslet star in James Cameron’s tale of the doomed ship.

Summer starts early for . . .: “Dante’s Peak”--Universal’s volcano pic is set for a March 7 release; “Volcano”--Fox hasn’t nailed down a release date for its volcano film yet; “Con Air”--Disney was so spooked by the glut of event films it moved its summer action-thriller to March.