Warner’s Star Vehicles Sputter at the Theaters

Warner Bros. will play matchmaker between Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant on Friday with the debut of its romantic comedy “Two Weeks Notice.”

With that, the studio may want to give its own love affair with movie stars a rest.

In the last year, Warner has been wrestling with an unusual concentration of relatively high-cost, and often underperforming, star vehicles. Among them: two previous pictures from Bullock, three from Robert De Niro and two -- both flops -- from Eddie Murphy.

The pileup has taken the edge off an otherwise good year for AOL Time Warner’s film unit and may be one of the last such star-studded schedules in a changing Hollywood.

The most recent star picture to hit for Warner, long known as a haven for big-name talent, was last December’s “Ocean’s Eleven.” The ensemble piece featured George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts and took in $183.4 million in U.S. ticket sales. Since then, the studio -- which ranks third at the box office with $980 million this year, 35% less than front-runner Sony Pictures -- has grabbed the largest share of its revenue from a pair of hits without major stars: “Scooby-Doo” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.”

Meanwhile, Warner has struggled with a dozen star-driven films whose performance can best be described as “soft and softer.” The best of them has been Bullock’s “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” which stopped well shy of blockbuster status with $69.6 million in ticket sales, though it was based on a pair of bestselling books.

That was stellar compared with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s big-budget bomb “Collateral Damage,” which raked in just $40 million, and Clint Eastwood’s “Blood Work,” with $26 million -- not to mention Murphy’s “The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” which cost more than $100 million to make and market and took in just $4 million at the box office.

“What winds up on the release schedule is kind of organic and not pursuant to any overall plan,” said Warner President and Chief Operating Officer Alan Horn. “Nobody would say, ‘Let’s do three movies with De Niro or two with Eddie Murphy.’ ”

Generally, Horn said, the studio aims for a healthy mix of films featuring as many as five “event pictures” -- those with virtually guaranteed audience appeal because of their special effects, well-known characters or perfect casting.

But the normal hazards of film packaging, he said, have become even trickier in the last couple of years because of Warner’s policy of reducing risk by sharing its slate with partners. Under this arrangement, Warner may handle a film’s distribution but leave all the creative decisions to its partner -- including the choosing of the stars.

One partner, Alcon Entertainment, produced “Insomnia” with Al Pacino and Robin Williams, which became the studio’s second-best star vehicle of the year, posting a relatively modest $67 million in ticket sales.

The film opened on the heels of “Death to Smoochy,” another Williams vehicle, in which Warner joined Senator, Film Four and other producers. That one generated just $8 million at the domestic box office. Yet another partner, Franchise Pictures, delivered “City by the Sea,” which was one of the studio’s three De Niro films. It opened three months before the star’s “Analyze That” and took in just $22 million at the box office, although it cost a reported $60 million to produce.

Under a new arrangement, Franchise now works more closely with executives before giving the green light to pictures for distribution by Warner, Horn said.

Warner’s confluence of big-star films this year is particularly unusual in an era when several competitors have been trying to diminish their reliance on expensive talent in favor of “branded” family fare such as Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch,” effects-driven spectacles such as Sony’s “Spider-Man” or niche pictures with breakout potential, including MGM’s “Barbershop.”

Because of sharply rising talent costs over the last decade, the judicious use of stars has become one of the most delicate challenges facing film executives.

The familiar faces on magazine covers are often a good bet to fill theater seats on an opening weekend. But an actress like Bullock may get $18 million a picture, and Schwarzenegger and others may top $20 million.

In the last several years, many of the biggest hits have been light on star power. Through the end of November, for instance, six of the 10 films with the highest ticket sales in 2002 had no superstars. The six were “Spider-Man,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Star Wars: Episode II,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and “Ice Age.”

Some close observers agree that Warner’s offerings, to some extent, simply reflect the breaks of the movie game. “It all depends on what comes together,” said Castle Rock Entertainment Chairman Martin Shafer. His company, also owned by AOL Time Warner, produced several Warner-distributed films, including “Two Weeks Notice.” It also made Bullock’s “Murder by Numbers” and Jim Carrey’s “The Majestic,” both of which did poorly at the box office.

Others, however, detect traces of a talent-friendly culture perfected by late Warner Chairman Steve Ross. “It’s a little bit of the old Warner style: ‘Let’s just make a movie with movie stars,’ ” said one top Hollywood film agent.

AOL Time Warner doesn’t separately report financial results for Warner Bros. Horn said the studio has been quite profitable for the year, thanks not only to the success of the “Harry Potter” series but also to the partnership arrangements, which gave the company healthy distribution fees on even some of the weakest films on its slate.

With only “Harry Potter” and “Scooby-Doo” to point to, the Warner president said his only regret is that the studio’s desire to produce multiple event films “was not reflected very strongly, frankly, in this year, ’02.”

Even so, the all-star traffic jam, and particularly the multiple appearances by stars, caused timing and marketing headaches. Perhaps the worst occurred when the studio delayed Murphy’s “Pluto Nash” to keep it from tripping over “Showtime,” another Murphy picture, only to have the films perform poorly amid bad fan buzz about the scheduling change.

Next year, Warner will largely avoid those troubling clusters. So far, its 2003 schedule includes only eight big-star movies, including “Terminator 3” with Schwarzenegger, “The Last Samurai” with Tom Cruise and “Matchstick Men” with Nicolas Cage. There also are a pair of “The Matrix” sequels, spaced six months apart, with Keanu Reeves.

At a Warner Bros. retreat last week, in fact, the talk was more about finding next-wave filmmakers than about the care and feeding of movie stars.

According to one person familiar with the retreat, film production chief Jeff Robinov, who assumed his post after Lorenzo di Bonaventura resigned this year, said he believed the studio had its “franchises” covered for the moment, with future versions of “The Matrix,” “Superman,” “Looney Tunes” and other films driven more by branding and concept than star power.

“A lot of us got into this business to be creative,” Robinov told his staff. “So let’s find out who the next writer, director and even producer is going to be.”