Closing Out 1997 With a Rush

Every play on words that can be made connecting Titanic, the ship, to “Titanic,” the movie, has already been made, and will be made many more times as the second goliath steams toward theaters. But as happy as it would make headline writers for James Cameron’s impossibly expensive, indulgent, self-defeatingly long movie to sink, you won’t find many people in Hollywood, or among theater operators, who expect it to.

“I think it’s a $200-million movie,” says an executive at a national theater chain, referring--for once--not to its budget but to its potential American grosses. “It’s still the one to beat.”

“Titanic,” of course, was to have been the one to beat this summer, but production delays and the enormity of its post-production tasks compelled Paramount to postpone its release, first to Thanksgiving, then to Dec. 19. You don’t put off the release of an average-priced major studio movie, and allow millions in interest to accumulate, let alone one whose costs--in comparable dollars--are rivaling those of the disastrous 1963 “Cleopatra.”

Normally, when a movie dominates the news during its production stage, with stories about delays, cost overruns, fights, firings and billowing budget estimates (“I hear it’s up to $250 million now.” “No, $250 billion!”), a sizable catastrophe is imminent.

But “Titanic” has survived, and last weekend, Paramount put the goods on display. 20th Century Fox, the film’s foreign distributor, and Cameron opted to premiere “Titanic” at the friendly Tokyo Film Festival, where star Leonardo DiCaprio is so popular, people were apparently wondering, “Who’s that ship up there with Leo?” More discerning witnesses at an exhibitor screening in Los Angeles came away declaring “Titanic” a solidly entertaining epic, maybe the first disaster movie since “The Towering Inferno” to have a legitimate claim on major Academy Award nominations.

The big question remaining is whether Paramount can book “Titanic” in enough theaters to establish it as a blockbuster during the brief holiday window. In introducing his movie in Tokyo, Cameron made the gloomy observation that there were about as many people in the audience as there had been on the Titanic, and putting a black border around the analogy, asked them to imagine two-thirds of them being dead by morning.

It would have been more dramatic to say that two-thirds of the audience would be dead by the end of the movie--it took the Titanic less than three hours to go down; the picture is more than three hours long. But the less said about ‘Titanic’s” length, the better. As it is, exhibitors will be able to show “Titanic” once per night per theater. They say they’ll overcome that by simply playing it on more screens and staggering the starting times.

But to make room, something else will have to go, and in the very dense holiday season, what’s it going to be?

When “Titanic” opens, theaters will have been showing Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad,” a high-seas-and-courtroom-drama about a mutiny aboard a slave ship, and Wes Craven’s “Scream 2” for just a week. “Scream 2” may be the surest box-office draw of the season; nobody’s moving it anywhere. And whether “Amistad” demonstrates Spielberg’s pre- or post-”Schindler’s List” sensibilities on historical themes, it’s likely to be a hot ticket into next year.

Had it opened in the summer, “Titanic” would have had a clear horizon. Nobody wanted to go up against it. But at Christmas, its rivals were left no choice. Opening on the same day as “Titanic” are “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the latest in the tireless James Bond series; “Home Alone 3,” minus Macaulay Culkin; and the DreamWorks comedy “Mousehunt.”

A week later comes the torrent. James L. Brooks’ urban comedy “As Good as It Gets,” whose advance word matches its title, opens Dec. 23. And on Christmas Day, out pops Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” Kevin Costner’s “The Postman,” the horror-comedy “An American Werewolf in Paris” and the scourge of the visually challenged, “Mr. Magoo.”

Add to all this the likely carry-over strength of such November releases as Clint Eastwood’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” Francis Ford Coppola’s “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker” (do two possessives make a negative?), the animated musical “Anastasia,” the Robin Williams comedy “Flubber,” the sci-fi thriller “Alien Resurrection” and possibly even Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers,” the all-time man-bites-bug movie that opened on Friday.

All together, 48 movies will be released in Southern California between now and the end of December. The total number is about the same as last year, but the ratio of wide-to-limited releases has shifted. There are 23 wide releases coming, compared to 17 during last year’s stretch run, meaning screens are going to be at an all-time premium.

But while the studios are fighting it out for theater bookings, Hollywood as a whole is likely to spend much of the holiday season relishing its potentialdomination of the Academy Awards.

This year’s ceremonies amounted to the biggest party for out-of-towners Hollywood has ever thrown. But no “Shines” or “English Patients” or “Secrets & Lies” have emerged from the foreign and independent sectors this year, leaving the ballots wide open for studio movies. Of the wide holiday releases, the early Oscar line favors “Amistad,” “As Good as It Gets,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “Titanic.”

Disney-owned Miramax, which has clearly outgrown its independent credentials, might expect some Oscar action for “Jackie Brown” as well. Tarantino’s last film, “Pulp Fiction,” received seven nominations.

But Oscar talk is going to be even more important to films opening in platform or limited release at year’s end. Among the blue-chip entries are Martin Scorsese’s Dalai Lama film “Kundun”; Michael Winterbottom’s Bosnia docudrama “Welcome to Sarajevo”; Gus Van Sant’s psychological drama “Good Will Hunting”; Alfonso Cuaron’s version of Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations”; Jim Sheridan’s “The Boxer,” which reunites the director with his “My Left Foot” and “In the Name of the Father” star Daniel Day-Lewis; and Gillian Armstrong’s “Oscar & Lucinda,” a romantic drama starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett as lovers brought together by their effort to move a glass church to the Australian outback.

One studio executive, with an Oscar contender in the holiday mix, grumbled about the growing ritual of opening Academy Award films in the last weeks of the year. “They must think academy members have the memory of fleas, that they can’t remember a movie that opened before November.”

It’s not their memory, it’s their focus. The Academy Awards are such a rich dish of self-served candy that voters don’t like to think about them between the March show and fall’s kickoff, when the Oscar campaigns begin in earnest. It’s an intense period of hard-sell that compromises even the major critics organizations, which rush to judgment in mid-December to assure a measure of publicity for themselves.

In any case, moviegoers are going to have a varied menu of holiday movies. Children’s fare includes “Anastasia,” “Home Alone 3,” “Mr. Magoo” and, for two weeks beginning Friday, the reissue of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.” In the thicket of comedies are “Flubber,” “Mousehunt,” “As Good as It Gets,” “An American Werewolf in Paris,” “For Richer or Poorer,” Barry Levinson’s “Wag the Dog,” Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry,” and the Hitchcock spoof “The Man Who Knew Too Little.”

Little action fans will have “Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation,” while big action fans have “The Jackal,” “The Postman” and “Alien Resurrection.” And in addition to the Oscar-hopeful dramas mentioned earlier, there are “John Grisham’s The Rainmaker”; Mike Figgis’ “One Night Stand,” his follow-up to “Leaving Las Vegas”; star-director Robert Duvall’s “The Apostle”; and Atom Egoyan’s Cannes hit “The Sweet Hereafter,” based on novelist Russell Banks’ deconstruction of a school bus tragedy.

Many of these movies will be casualties of the competitive crush, but if exhibitors and Hollywood insiders are accurate, here are a dozen films that will still be going strong in wide release when the season officially ends:

“Titanic.” Sources have estimated that by the time marketing costs are added, James Cameron’s reenactment of the ocean liner’s ill-fated voyage could total $285 million. That means it will have to take in about $600 million from theaters worldwide to make its nut. But for viewers investing only $7 to $9, it could be the bargain of the year.

“As Good as It Gets.” James L. Brooks’ new comedy, about strangers in Manhattan brought together by a dog, rated four pooper-scoopers at a convention of enthusiastic exhibitors last month in Atlantic City. Eyewitnesses were predicting another Oscar nomination for Jack Nicholson, who co-stars with Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear.

“Tomorrow Never Dies.” The 20th James Bond movie, and the second for Pierce Brosnan, is said to be among the best of them. With two studios now fighting for the right to make the next 20, it looks like tomorrow never will die for 007.

“Scream 2.” Miramax sold $100 million worth of tickets to last year’s “Wes Craven’s Scream,” and a lot of insiders believe the sequel could double the take.

“Jackie Brown.” Tarantino has lived a life of fiction since he quit renting out videos. “Reservoir Dogs” made him an icon of independent film, “Pulp Fiction” made him a household name throughout the world, and his recent punching of a producer in a restaurant made him the butt of industry jokes. Has Tarantino transformed into a Tarantino character? Still, the faithful will turn out in force for a film that promises to do for Pam Grier and Robert Forster what “Pulp Fiction” did for John Travolta.

“Amistad.” What kind of pressure was Spielberg under in directing his first film for DreamWorks? Did he invest it with the same passion for historical truth and detail as he did with “Schindler’s List,” or is he compromising the material to broaden the audience, as he did with “The Color Purple”? DreamWorks executives claim they haven’t seen it yet, so the buzz and the movie may arrive at the same time.

“Anastasia.” If this animated musical about the daughter of the last Russian czar bore the Disney imprint, its blockbuster status would be assured. But it’s from Fox, animated under the supervision of former Disney illustrators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, so we’ll see if Disney still owns the franchise on animation. Disney is sending out antibodies to slow the invasion, in the form of its reissue of “The Little Mermaid” a week before.

“Alien Resurrection.” We all cheered the death of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley at the end of “Alien3”--it meant the series was finally over. But she’s back, and so is the alien she keeps killing. But under the direction of the funky Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Delicatessen”), it’s said to be the best episode since the original in 1979.

“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Eastwood’s adaptation of John Berendt’s bestseller about a magazine writer’s adventures with high- and lowlifes in Savannah, Ga., reunites the director with his “A Perfect World” writer John Lee Hancock. Eastwood isn’t in the movie, but his daughter Alison is, co-starring in her first major role opposite Kevin Spacey and John Cusack.

“Flubber.” Casting Robin Williams in the role played by Fred MacMurray in the 1961 comedy classic “The Absent Minded Professor” seems a stroke of commercial genius. But Williams fans can only hope the movie is a lot better than its trailer.

“The Postman.” Kevin Costner directs for the first time since his Oscar-sweeping “Dances With Wolves.” Though its plot similarities to “Waterworld”--they’re both about a loner trying to survive in a blitzed-out future--have some people calling it “Dirtworld,” the film has endured none of the earlier film’s problems or bad press.

“John Grisham’s The Rainmaker.” Now that he’s as big as Shakespeare, the one-note author of overachieving rookie attorney novels apparently figures his name should be included in the titles of movies adapted from his books. Coppola may breathe some life into his latest, and newcomer Matt Damon, who also has the lead in “Good Will Hunting,” is already being billed as Hollywood’s next major star.