Box Office Mania Gets Mixed Reviews

It is the season of the summer blockbuster, a time when Hollywood traditionally rolls out its technologically dazzling, action-packed, mega-budget movies, and every Sunday night, TV news anchors announce which film captured first place in weekend ticket sales and which films stumbled.

In a country obsessed with rankings, the media spew forth these grosses like clockwork: Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur sequel, “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” gobbles up $90.2 million in four days. The sci-fi comedy “Men in Black” devastates the competition with $84.1 million in five days. “Air Force One,” which opened this past weekend, took in $37.1 million in three days, the strongest opening ever for an R-rated film.

But beyond the figures is a modern phenomenon that reaches into nearly every city, town and hamlet in America and beyond--one so ingrained in the public psyche that it affects popular culture, community attitudes and shared habits.

It is a media-induced monster--part statistics, part illusion--that each week sends tremors through mighty corporations, launches and kills careers, induces and stifles creativity, and gives just about everyone something to talk about.

It is the weekly box office.

In less than a decade, the opening weekend grosses have become a double-edged sword for Hollywood studios: a publicity tool that they exploit to arouse interest in their films, but also a determining factor in what films are approved, how they are cast and even the weekend they are released.

But far beyond Hollywood, the rankings are altering American moviegoing routines in subtle yet significant ways, changing not only what we decide to see, but at times even the choice of films we are offered.

Until recent years, knowing what film was No. 1 on a particular weekend was primarily the task of film industry gnomes with a flair for accounting who toiled in anonymity.

Today, the public can’t escape the box office. It is splashed across major newspapers and magazines, given weight by the utterances of network newscasters, chatted about incessantly on “Entertainment Tonight,” “Access Hollywood” and E! Entertainment Television, and even commented upon by the guy in line at the local mega-plex.

Tim Appelo, film critic of the Oregonian in Portland, said he is amazed at how “total strangers will call up the paper and talk about [box office] in astoundingly insider terms.”

“Even people in Boring, Ore., know what per-screen average is,” he said with a laugh.

Robert Sklar, professor of cinema at New York University, said he has seen a tremendous change in the news coverage of movie box office: “It is in every newspaper Monday morning; it’s on the radio. It’s almost in some ways more interesting than the movies themselves.”

Director Phillip Noyce said he recently returned from a 10-nation promotional tour for Paramount Pictures’ “The Saint.” In each country, people would state the movie’s U.S. box office grosses.

Even at a Moscow hotel, Noyce marveled, “a person at the check-in counter was able to tell me that [‘The Saint’] had taken in over $16 million in its first weekend--but that it wasn’t No. 1, it was No. 2.” Indeed, the film had debuted behind Jim Carrey’s “Liar Liar.”

Mania Traced to ‘Sequel Summer’

Exactly when the weekly box office became grist for mainstream news coverage is hard to pinpoint. In their day, movies such as “Jaws” and “Star Wars” certainly attracted attention for their popular appeal.

Marcy Polier, founder and president of Entertainment Data, which collects box office figures for studios, said she believes the phenomenon took off in the late 1980s.

“All of a sudden, we were covering 75% of the marketplace and were able to provide [the numbers] to the studios,” she recalled. “In those days, as the figures began to get bigger and bigger, and the press and [studio] executives saw these numbers, they were just astounding. As records began to be broken, and new records began to be established, it was news.”

Polier said the studios soon realized that “they could capitalize on the momentum of the opening by releasing the spectacular figures to the press. . . . In those days, the marketplace was not as crowded as it is today, so these films were generally leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.”

Studio officials trace the mania to the “sequel summer” of 1989-- “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “Ghostbusters II” and “Lethal Weapon 2,” as well as “Batman” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” Those five grossed $839 million in North America.

The appearance of box office rankings coincided with the growth of entertainment journalism in general, from a slew of TV shows to such periodicals as Entertainment Weekly and Premiere.

Today, this relentless focus on which film is No. 1 has become both an exhilarating ride and a destructive force for filmmakers and studios--which receive not just overall weekend numbers, but daily figures throughout the week.

“I’m now afraid to make a movie I can’t make an opening weekend out of,” said a high-ranking official at one studio who asked not to be identified. “If I can’t get an opening weekend, I know I’ll start losing screens [to competitors] and there is no word-of-mouth out there because . . . by Saturday morning people are saying, ‘It’s a flop.’ ”

Entertainment attorney Tom Hansen said the fixation on the weekly box office is taking a huge toll on the creative community.

“You’ve got a project that takes two or three years, the work of hundreds of people and the expenditure of millions of dollars, and it seems to all boil down to what happens in the first weekend. That makes people so nervous, so unhappy, so tortured.”

With a budget estimated at $145 million to $160 million, “Speed 2: Cruise Control”--is a lavish, highly promoted sequel to the 1994 hit “Speed.” But the numbers for its opening weekend in mid-June barely edged out “Con Air,” which had opened the week before. To date, “Speed 2” has grossed $45.8 million domestically.

“Everybody knew ‘Speed 2’ was gone in the first couple minutes and there was no retrieving it at that point,” Hansen said.

The competition to be No. 1 affects studios, exhibitors and the public alike, according to Howard Lichtman, executive vice president of marketing and communications for Cineplex Odeon theaters.

Exhibitors are hurt, he said, because they pay higher rentals for new movies that come and go quickly. Studios are hurt because their films are no longer given much of a chance to grow. And consumers are hurt because they are not given enough choices.

“Films today are being released on thousands of screens at a time,” Lichtman said. “The net result of that is, if a film takes up 2,000 or 3,000 screens, it is taking up a large portion of the shelf space available.

“The industry is healthy when there are a number of films in the marketplace appealing to various segments of our audience, whether they are sophisticated art films, family films, action films, science fiction films or romantic comedies. By taking up a large proportion of screen space, you are limiting variety.”

Twenty years ago, one studio executive said, movies often could take four or five weeks before word-of-mouth helped them build in popularity. Those days are long gone.

But if the box office rankings suddenly disappeared, would Hollywood change the way it makes movies?

“I think there would be a much greater variety of films made, because it would be people going more by their innate dramatic tastes rather than by their innate pocketbook tastes,” said director Arthur Hiller, who emphasized that people who bankroll films deserve a return on investments.

A top official at one studio put it more bluntly: “It would lead to higher-concept movies. Now, you depend on a few movie stars to open a film--and that’s not a guarantee.”

What would change most, some studio executives say, is the way movies are being released--there would be less block buying of screens, and because of that films could have a longer shelf life.

“But more importantly,” said Dick Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Group, “you would have those journalists now writing about the business of show business writing about the movies themselves, which would generate more business.”

‘It’s Become Like an Addiction’

Tom Sherak, who heads distribution at 20th Century Fox, said the industry would be better off if the media did not focus on box office estimates distributed by studios on Sundays--before the weekend’s business is concluded.

The studios, however, also use the estimates to hype their strong openers. “It’s become like an addiction,” Sherak said.

“The people who like it best are the publicity people,” he added. “It makes for good press. The problem is: If you have a movie that isn’t No. 1 or No. 2, a lot of times the press doesn’t understand the intricacies of what the numbers mean.”

“We had a movie many years ago called ‘Big’ starring Tom Hanks,” Sherak recalled. “It did about $110 million at the box office domestically--and this was before Tom Hanks was Tom Hanks. Yet it was never No. 1 at the box office in any weekend that it played.”

Conversely, “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” which reportedly cost $35 million to $40 million, debuted in first place last August, yet wound up taking in only $27.7 million domestically.

And sometimes a film can be deemed a dud simply because the box office doesn’t live up to expectations. That happened with radio “shock jock” Howard Stern’s autobiographical film, “Private Parts,” which debuted at No. 1 the weekend of March 7. The $28-million to $30-million movie ended up grossing $41 million in North America--more than its cost, but not nearly as much as the early predictions.

Entertainment Data’s Polier said that when the media emphasize the opening weekend figures, “it’s like focusing on the score of a football game after the first quarter.” She said she would like to see the media report the rankings--without giving numbers--in the way book bestseller lists are compiled.

Producer Lauren Shuler-Donner said the public understands what being No. 1 means, but she wonders if it truly understands the figures.

“Volcano,” for example, opened as No. 1 in April with $14.6 million in ticket sales and received the resulting hype. But the movie, which reportedly cost nearly $100 million, has grossed only $47.1 million domestically.

“People across the country said, ‘Boy, that movie was really a success,’ ” said Shuler-Donner, a producer on the film. “Well, it wasn’t really successful for what it cost.”

Tom Pollock, the former head of Universal Pictures and now chairman of the American Film Institute, said the fixation on box office has “devalued” movies.

“Just as politics has been devalued by turning every issue into a horse race, movies have been devalued by turning every film into a contest for opening day records,” Pollock said. “It devalues quality and emphasizes marketability.

In simple numbers, the box office serves to document the sheer power of one of America’s true economic engines--the movies. According to the Motion Picture Assn. of America, domestic ticket sales totaled $5.91 billion in 1996. A decade earlier, the figure stood at $3.78 billion. (The statistics are not adjusted for inflation.)

During the same decade, the number of movie screens jumped from 22,365 to 29,690--and that amount should increase to more than 30,000 by year’s end. Meanwhile, the average admission price went from $3.71 to $4.41. This includes children’s rates, bargain prices and the lower charges in areas outside big cities.

While some may wonder why the public should be interested in the box office, filmmakers live and breathe the figures--estimating the weekend’s take from Friday’s numbers.

Producer Gary Lucchesi said that when his 1996 courtroom drama “Primal Fear” starring Richard Gere was released by Paramount, he knew what number the film had to gross Friday to have a successful weekend run.

“I went to bed Friday night saying to myself, ‘I need to hear $3 million-plus [for] Friday night,’ ” Lucchesi said. On Saturday morning, he learned the film had hit its mark. “If I had heard $1.8 million, I knew the movie wasn’t going to work.” “Primal Fear” opened at No. 1, taking in $9.9 million in three days.

Studios Can Play With Figures

Brian Grazer, who has produced 35 films, including the Academy Award nominee “Apollo 13” and “Liar Liar,” said that even with a movie as popular as Carrey’s comedy, he still worries before the box office grosses roll in.

“I sweat every movie like they are my first movie,” he said, “which it isn’t a psychologically healthy thing to do.”

The problem, Grazer said, is that with all the intense focus on box office results, filmmakers today are shoved under an uncomfortable spotlight. “If your movie doesn’t do well now,” he said, “it’s a public embarrassment.”

Although box office figures speak starkly for themselves, a certain mythology has built up that often clouds their importance.

Unlike Major League Baseball, which holds its records sacrosanct and whose statistics can be safely compared from one generation to the next, studio box office figures make for difficult comparisons even from one month to the next. The totals are always being affected by inflation, admission prices and the number of screens, yet Hollywood loves to rank the movies on how much they made.

The grosses are collected for the studios by Entertainment Data. The studios then take those figures, add amounts from whatever theaters that company did not include and give that information to another firm called Exhibitor Relations, which tracks box office. Exhibitor Relations distributes the figures to news outlets.

But the studios have ample opportunity to play with the numbers. For example, they may put a film out for a Thursday night “preview” then include those figures to pump up the Friday-through-Sunday weekend grosses. Or they may sit on the numbers until they see what the competition is saying.

Last fall, for instance, Paramount and New Line Cinema locked horns. Paramount said it won the weekend with “The Ghost and the Darkness,” an adventure-thriller starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. New Line said its film “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” starring Geena Davis, won. Sources said both studios lingered in reporting their figures, waiting for the competition to blink first.

There is also the matter of how studios report screen count. They usually announce the number of “play dates,” which in Hollywood jargon means theater locations. What isn’t mentioned is the number of prints delivered to a theater or the number of screens a film is showing on. It is common at many mega-plexes, for instance, for a film to run on one screen and, through an interlocking mechanism, appear almost simultaneously on an adjoining screen.

But if studios were to report the number of screens a film appeared on--rather than play dates-- the “per-screen average” might drop and they would lose another bit of bragging material.

Indeed, bragging is a big part of the game. Studio hype-masters use the weekend grosses to crow about records that may seem silly to the average person: This film had the fifth highest three-day non-holiday opening ever.

Impact Reaches Smaller Towns

What the public doesn’t learn from the weekend grosses is that the No. 1 film may have taken in $12 million but cost $100 million to produce and market. The opening figures also don’t provide clues to a film’s long-term prospects.

Why do the media place such emphasis on movie grosses?

Cynthia Oi, features editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, said it is because the public views the rankings as a “standard of success.”

“If you all went to see ‘Face / Off’ [on its opening] weekend,” she said, “you feel part of the crowd, because it made $22 million. You validated your choice because other people liked it too.”

But director Noyce said the rankings also reflect the instant information age in which we live.

“It’s a byproduct of the USA Today factor,” he said, referring to the graphics-dominated national newspaper. “Everything is reduced down to a table--salt consumption, condom sales. And, of course, that graphics style and reduction of information has become the norm all over the world.”

The effects of box office mania reach beyond Hollywood to smaller towns across America. Theater owners want to run sure bets--and want big movies because they drive concession sales. As a result, audiences may feel cheated because they can’t find independent films in their neighborhoods.

Cathy Downing, features editor of the Anniston Star, said it sometimes is a struggle to get smaller films in her Alabama town.

“We didn’t get ‘The English Patient’ until after it had already won the Oscar,” she said. “Anything even mildly artsy is very slow to get here. But ‘Liar Liar’ is playing all summer.”

Gallery owner Anne Marie Stillion found it nearly impossible to see independent movies in Flagstaff, Ariz. So she and other members of the Northern Arizona Film Society three years ago waged a campaign with a local theater owner to bring in a broader spectrum of films.

The community pressure resulted in regular screenings of smaller movies during winter and spring. The first such film shown was “Like Water for Chocolate.”

“It sold out,” Stillion said. “And this was at a crummy little theater on the wrong side of town that never had lines.”

She conceded that her own tastes run counter to the blockbuster action movies that are summer’s staple.

“They disgust me,” she said, “and I seldom darken their doors.”

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Big Numbers

Although studios complain of increasing media scrutiny of their films’ box office performance, they nonetheless can’t resist taking out big ads in trade magazines to crow about films when they perform well.