In Box-Office Game, It’s All About the Franchise Players

In a comic outtake at the end of “Rush Hour 2,” Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan toss a bad guy out of a hotel window. Tucker then jokes: “Guess he won’t be around for ‘Rush Hour 3’!”

In the 1930s, Hollywood’s best movies were musicals and screwball comedies. In the 1970s, films were full of loners, losers and brooding antiheroes. But the movies that exemplify the spirit of our time are part of a genre that has more to do with corporate profits than content: the Franchise Film. And in an age when much of pop culture is based on borrowed references, whether it’s advertisers using dead celebrities to sell beer or hip-hop music creating hits out of melodies lifted from old pop songs, it’s no surprise that success in modern-day Hollywood is increasingly dependent on cultivating the familiar.

The Franchise Film is not so much a movie as a self-perpetuating commodity, a carefully constructed cash cow designed to appeal to the widest possible spectrum of moviegoers, fueling merchandising tie-ins, DVD sales, theme park attractions and video game spinoffs, all geared to keeping consumers occupied until the next movie starts the cycle again.

Since the earliest days of the business, studio moguls have tried every way imaginable to make film financing less of a longshot gamble, from buying bestsellers to hiring magnetic movie stars. They finally hit pay dirt with the Franchise Film, a brand name product that can be repackaged over and over like basketball sneakers or soft drinks.

“Franchises create tent poles, movies that have a built-in awareness and interest from a pretty big potential audience,” says DreamWorks production chief Mike De Luca, who helped oversee a string of successful franchises while head of production at New Line, including “Rush Hour,” “Austin Powers” and “Friday.” “Franchises give you something to count on in a business where you often can’t count on anything.”

This year alone saw the release of six franchise sequels: “The Mummy Returns,” “Dr. Dolittle 2,” “Scary Movie 2,” “Jurassic Park 3,” “American Pie 2” and “Rush Hour 2.” Five of the six films took in more than $100 million (the exception was “Scary Movie 2”), while three of the six sequels brought in more money than the original. Nearly half of the top 50 grossing films of the past decade are part of a franchise series or have sequels in the works. You can soon add one more film to that list: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” which took in a record-breaking $90.3 million in its opening weekend and should end up as the year’s top-grossing film before the end of the holiday season.

“Potter” is the ultimate modern-day franchise--call it Potter Ltd. It’s based on the hugely successful series of books by J.K. Rowling. The rights to the books were acquired in 1997 by Warner Bros. for $500,000. The studio spent more than $125 million making the first movie, but that’s a pittance when you consider that Coca-Cola alone recently paid $150 million for the exclusive global rights to promote the film and its sequels. Every arm of the corporation is cross-promoting the film, from AOL to Moviefone to Music.

When the studio gave its Time magazine sister company an exclusive look at the finished film earlier this month, the studio pointedly didn’t let Time’s critics see the movie--the preview story was written by one of the magazine’s entertainment reporters, whose praise for the film was used as a critic’s blurb in the studio’s opening-weekend print ads. As studio chairman Alan Horn put it recently: “We want to maximize this franchise in every way.”

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In today’s Hollywood, maximizing means playing it safe. The studio had its choice of virtually any director for “Potter,” from Steven Spielberg to Jonathan Demme to Terry Gilliam. But rather than hire a distinctive filmmaker who would put his own stamp on the material, the studio opted for Chris Columbus, a onetime Spielberg protege who wrote ingenious kids’ films like “Gremlins” and “The Goonies” before directing a string of increasingly lackluster, sentimental movies, including “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Stepmom” and “Bicentennial Man.”

Columbus delivered just what the studio wanted--a $125-million movie with absolutely no surprises. Columbus approaches the book more like a stenographer than a filmmaker. He’s almost completely anonymous. It’s easier to identify John Williams’ bombastic score than anything attributable to Columbus’ directorial personality. If all you want to do is make money, not good movies, it’s a shrewd move.

Audiences today crave familiarity--they don’t want filmmakers to stray too far from the source material. Give them a new “Jurassic Park” with bigger, scarier dinosaurs, and most fans will go away happy. It’s not just an American phenomenon. In France, franchise films are the rage, with seven series in active development, including a sequel to the Claude Zidi hit “Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar” and “Taxi 3,” a follow-up to “Taxi 2,” the country’s biggest hit in 2000.

In many ways, franchise films are the direct outgrowth of an audience sensibility shaped by what you might call opening-weekend hypnosis. Being a No. 1 hit is now a marketing tool in itself. Many moviegoers judge a film by its bang at the box office, not by its critical reception. If you’re a studio executive, the logic is inescapable: Making a movie based on a hit attracts a built-in audience.

“It used to be just the hard-core Trekkies who wouldn’t let filmmakers change a thing,” says New York magazine film critic Peter Rainer. “But with these franchise movies everyone has become a Trekkie. No one wants the filmmakers to take any creative license.”

When Tim Burton made the sequel “Batman Returns” too weird and obsessive, alienating the series’ core fans, Warner took the director off the series, replacing him with a director, Joel Schumacher, who made the films more homogenized.

Twentieth Century Fox put its “Alien” franchise in the hands of such gifted filmmakers as James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but the series has spiraled downward at the box office since Cameron’s “Aliens.” Most critics viewed George Miller’s “Babe 2” as strikingly original, but audiences were scared off by its dark tone and refused to go see it.

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Warner is taking no such chances. “Potter” is on an assembly-line pace guaranteed to provide the studio with a key moneymaker for many holiday seasons to come. Columbus begins filming the sequel this week, while Steven Kloves, who penned the first two installments, has already begun writing a third film.

The AOL Time top brass has also mandated that the studio generate more franchises from its sprawling library of comic-book and cartoon characters. At least one “Matrix” sequel is slated for a 2003 release, while scripts are in the works for another “Batman,” a “Batman vs. Superman” movie, a “Catwoman” film and a variety of updated “Looney Tunes” 20 projects.

Warner is hardly alone. “Every studio needs a franchise these days,” notes 20th Century Fox Co-Chairman Tom Rothman. MGM would be in the poorhouse without its James Bond films.

Sony Pictures floundered in recent years in part because it couldn’t jump-start a stable of lucrative franchises. The studio’s future looks brighter because it has a 2002 slate that includes “Men in Black 2,” “Stuart Little 2” and “Once Upon a Time in Mexico: Desperado 2,” plus the first installment in a new “Spiderman” franchise.

Universal had a phenomenal summer this year, propelled by “The Mummy Returns,” “Jurassic Park 3” and “American Pie 2.” Having hit pay dirt with “Rush Hour 2,” New Line launches its “Lord of the Rings” series next month. Its 2002 slate relies heavily on such sequels as “Austin Powers in Goldmember,” “Blade 2,” “The Friday After Next” and “Final Destination 2.”

With franchises, creativity often takes a back seat to marketing priorities. “Too often you’re working backwards because the studio has green-lit the movie before you’ve finished the script,” says producer Neal Moritz, who oversaw the “I Know What You Did Last Summer” series. New Line, for example, picked a July 26, 2002 release date for its next “Austin Powers” film months before the film went into production.

Most studios operate like Universal, which had options on its “American Pie” cast members, so it could keep costs down on the sequel. Wanting to move ahead with a sequel to “The Fast and the Furious,” but knowing it might not be able to make a deal for the suddenly very much-in-demand Vin Diesel (who’s getting $12.5 million for a sequel to “Pitch Black”), the studio has two scripts in development, one with a major part for Diesel, one without.

Fox’s Rothman says he sleeps better at night knowing he has “X Men 2” in the works. “Putting out movies is a lot like launching a new model car every weekend--you never know what will work,” he says.

“What’s great about a franchise like ‘X Men’ is that you get to start with nearly universal awareness and a lot of positive interest. In a business full of unknowns, it gives you a tiny bit of security.”

If I were a filmmaker, I’d find this all discouraging, but audiences don’t want surprises right now--they prefer the cozy cocoon of familiarity.

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.