Spring Release Fever Hits the Studios

Like airplanes backed up for miles on a runway, the upcoming summer movie schedule is so crowded that something had to give. As Fox senior executive Tom Sherak warns: “There’s no room in summer.”

So to avoid major collisions, the studios are leaping backward into the normally slower month of April to give some high-profile films a chance to establish themselves before the real summer tumult commences. The summer movie preseason kicks off this week and goes into high gear by the end of the month.

The early summer takeoffs begin Friday with Disney’s “Keeping the Faith,” with rising stars Ben Stiller, Jenna Elfman and Edward Norton (who also directed it), and Sony’s comedy-drama “28 Days,” with proven box-office draw Sandra Bullock. The studios are hoping that the films will pull in the date-night crowd until mid-May, when the first spate of summer comedies arrives.

Next up is Universal. Last year, the studio moved up the summer movie timetable by opening “The Mummy” on the first week of May (it went on to gross $155 million). This year the clock gets moved back even further; on April 21 “U-571,” Universal’s World War II submarine saga, surfaces to avoid the extra-heavy “boy summer” spate of action films.

A week later, Universal opens “The Flintstones” sequel “Viva Rock Vegas” to gain some ground on the numerous family-oriented films arriving in rapid succession over the next two months.

“We feel that if we can give each film its own time and space without being surrounded by films that outspend us and have an even higher profile, we can still be playing through Memorial Day,” says Universal marketing head Marc Shmuger.

It’s a strategy that paid off last year for Fox when it introduced the Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta-Jones film “Entrapment” on the last weekend in April and was able to play right through June, taking in almost $88 million.

The early-bird films will need all the visibility they can get because starting May 5, another “survival of the fittest” summer begins, notes DreamWorks marketing executive Terry Press. DreamWorks long ago bookmarked the first weekend in May with its sword-and-sandal epic “Gladiator,” starring Russell Crowe. It’s a strategy that worked for the company in the past with “Deep Impact” and has also proven to be a bonanza for films like “Twister” and “The Mummy.”

The summer season is when the motion picture industry does more than 40% of its yearly business. Therefore, say industry insiders, it makes sense to try to build on that total by extending the season--especially since this year brings the Summer Olympics in September, which could endanger late-summer business that usually follows Labor Day.

‘There’s No Place to Be Alone This Summer’

From beginning to end, it’s going to be an extra-crowded movie summer. During the past couple of years, the first half of the lucrative season--with the exception of Memorial Day--usually has been reserved for one major title per weekend. This year the big titles are arriving in twos and threes.

“There’s no place to be alone this summer,” says Jeff Blake, head of distribution at Sony Pictures. Despite claims that each weekend’s films are targeted to different audiences, that’s not the case this summer. Movies with strikingly similar demographic appeal will be arriving one on top of another.

As Sherak points out, there are seven animated (or partly animated) films alone aimed at the family audience: Fox’s “Titan A.E.,” DreamWorks’ “Chicken Run,” Disney’s “Dinosaurs” and the “Fantasia 2000” national (non-Imax) release, Warners’ “Pokemon” sequel, Universal’s “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and Destination’s “Thomas and the Magic Railroad.” Four of them arrive in just a three-week period: “Titan” and “Fantasia” will go head to head on June 16; the stop-motion “Chicken Run” debuts just one week later, “Rocky and Bullwinkle” the week after.

Big family films are mostly locked into their dates because of promotional tie-ins with fast-food and retailing chains; there is rarely an opportunity to pull the movie out and move it to a less competitive slot.

Contributing to the pile-up are independently made releases. The indies usually avoid the expensive advertising outlay necessary in summer to compete with the deep-pocket major studios. Not this year. Emboldened by the runaway success last year of Artisan’s “The Blair Witch Project,” companies like Miramax are going into prime-time summer spots in early June and July with alternative fare.

Mark Gill, Miramax’s West Coast president, chose the first weekend in June for the teen romantic comedy “Boys and Girls,” starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jason Biggs, and the first weekend in July for the horror movie spoof “Scary Movie.” Miramax has, in the past, usually only been a factor at the end of the season, but couldn’t resist the seven-day availability of the youth audience earlier in the summer. Miramax also will have two films in August, the sci-fi flick “Imposter” and the action-adventure “Texas Rangers.”

In addition, DreamWorks, which slowly has been ramping up over the past couple of years, has six major summer releases this year, as much as most of the other major studios. In addition to “Gladiator,” DreamWorks has two other May releases: the youth comedy “Road Trip” and Woody Allen’s comedy “Small Time Crooks.” They’re followed by “Chicken Run”; the Robert Zemeckis drama “What Lies Beneath,” starring Harrison Ford; and “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” starring Will Smith and Matt Damon.

More high-profile movies mean more potential casualties. “The only people who win all-around are the media-buying companies,” says Press, only half-kidding, noting that TV ad expenditures are high because “it’s all a matter of who can scream the loudest and that costs money.”

The major battles start around the Memorial Day period. With no 800-pound gorilla like last year’s “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace,” several studios are jumping on the holiday bandwagon with high-visibility films--”Gladiator,” “Dinosaur,” Warners’ “Battlefield Earth” and Paramount’s “M:I-2” (“Mission Impossible 2”) as well as targeted movies like Sony’s “Center Stage” and “I Dreamed of Africa” (the female audience), “Road Trip” (the youth audience), “Small Time Crooks” (adults) and the Jackie Chan action-comedy “Shanghai Noon” from Disney.

The major studios left “money on the table” (as the popular industry saying goes) last year when most of them avoided opening around the time of “Star Wars.” The ones that weren’t frightened off by “Star Wars,” like Universal, which had both “The Mummy” and the romantic-comedy “Notting Hill,” cleaned up. This year, everyone’s hoping for a piece of the action, despite the edge that a big-name sequel like “M:I-2” with Tom Cruise would seem to enjoy.

The Fourth of July period will be no less congested when two major (and mega-costly) action titles--”The Patriot,” with Mel Gibson, and “The Perfect Storm,” starring George Clooney--are scheduled to go one-on-one. On the lighter side, “Rocky and Bullwinkle” competes with “Chicken Run” and the Jim Carrey comedy “Me, Myself and Irene,” both of which open a week earlier.

There’ll be another traffic jam at the end of July and the beginning of August. July 28 brings Universal’s “The Klumps,” the sequel to the “Nutty Professor” starring Eddie Murphy, as well as the effects-driven “Hollow Man,” which will be followed a week later by Disney’s comedy “Coyote Ugly,” “Bagger Vance” and the Clint Eastwood movie “Space Cowboys.”

The lineup begins Friday. Studios, start your engines.