The Next Action Heroes

By CLAUDIA ELLER

May 5, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Dwayne Johnson and Mark Vincent are two of Hollywood’s hottest commodities.

Who?

Maybe you know them by the brand names the studios are trying to sear into your consciousness--the Rock and Vin Diesel--action hunks whose paychecks have jumped millions of dollars in a single bound.

They are the leading men in the industry’s latest gambit to instantly create a new generation of action stars for movies that can spawn sequels and prequels, generating hundreds of millions of dollars around the world from ticket sales, DVDs, promotional tie-ins and TV deals. In the business, these are called “franchise” movies.

With escalating costs of producing and marketing films, the entertainment giants that control Hollywood are frantically trying to produce blockbusters that have the potential to just keep on giving. To do so, the studios are engaged in a checkbook war to manufacture successors to such aging action heroes as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis.

“There’s a corporate mentality among multinational companies that we need brand names, whether it’s Coke, Pepsi, Nike, Vin Diesel or the Rock,” said director Rob Cohen, whose surprise hit “The Fast and the Furious” fuel-injected Diesel’s career.

The attitude in the industry these days, Cohen said, is: “We’re not going to wait for them to be stars, we’re going to make them stars, demand that the media treat them like stars and we’ll pay them like stars and ultimately some, in fact, will become stars.”

As Warner Bros. President Alan Horn put it: “It doesn’t take five pictures to grind your way to stardom if you have a distinct persona like Vin Diesel or the Rock.”

The Rock, a 30-year-old wrestling superstar, was paid more than $5 million by Universal Pictures for his first starring role in the newly released “The Scorpion King,” a box-office hit that all but guarantees him $20 million for the planned sequel.

Not a bad bump for a guy who got $500,000 for his debut film, “The Mummy Returns,” last summer.

The Rock’s marketable name and memorable image are being exploited to lure moviegoers unaware of his routines in the ring. His name appears above the title of “Scorpion King” in every poster, billboard, newspaper ad and TV spot promoting the new film, a prequel to “The Mummy Returns.”

Vin Diesel, meanwhile, has seen his salary soar tenfold. The beefy 34-year-old actor with a throaty voice and shaved head was paid $1 million for the car-racing film “The Fast and the Furious,” and he wasn’t even cast as the star. But the audience--young, multiethnic and demographically desirable--went crazy over him. So did Hollywood.

In the industry’s eyes, the actor who was once a bouncer at hip New York nightclubs suddenly transcended the kind of ensemble roles he played in such films as “Saving Private Ryan” and “Boiler Room.”

The transformation was not lost on Diesel.

Immediately after the success of “The Fast and the Furious,” he left on vacation with instructions for his agent not to bother him unless someone ponied up a whopping $10 million for his next picture.

Joe Roth, the former head of Disney Studios who now runs independently financed Revolution Studios, reluctantly stepped forward with the money for an actor he acknowledged is “totally unproven” as a star.

Still, Roth concluded that Diesel would be perfect in the upcoming summer spy thriller “XXX.” The tattooed Diesel plays an extreme sports rebel recruited by the government to infiltrate a Russian crime ring.

“I had ambivalent feelings about giving someone that giant of a raise after one hit movie,” Roth said. “But you’re in a business of taking risks. It’s a business of hunches.”

And Roth has a hunch that Diesel is going to turn “XXX” into a platinum franchise. Although the movie, directed by Cohen, doesn’t open until August, Diesel already has been promised $20 million for a potential sequel.

Roth can remember when the word “franchise” wasn’t even part of the Hollywood vernacular.

In 1988, the year before he became movie chairman at 20th Century Fox, the studio’s action film “Die Hard” with Bruce Willis had been a huge success in theaters and on video. But to Roth’s surprise, there was no sequel in development. He had the idea of turning a book titled “58 Minutes” into “Die Hard 2.” It became a bigger hit than the original.

That scenario would not happen today.

Now movie sequels are plotted far in advance, before the first film is even shot, so they can be rolled out and repackaged.

This summer, Columbia Pictures has a slate full of them. They include sequels to “Men in Black” and “Stuart Little,” as well as two films envisioned as franchises--”XXX” and “Spider-Man.”

It appears that studio chief Amy Pascal gambled right on the unlikely casting of dramatic actor Tobey Maguire as the star of “Spider-Man,” paying him $4 million for the first film and guaranteeing him a combined $23 million for two sequels. Sources said “Spider-Man” grossed an estimated record of $39 million on Friday when it debuted, putting it on track to have the biggest opening weekend in movie history.

“We have to create stars; that’s what the movies are about,” Pascal said. “Hollywood decides that somebody is hot and everyone clamors for them. The whole bet is getting in on the ground floor of a rising star’s career.”

And the anointed aren’t complaining.

“If I’m the locomotive, the actor driving those sales, I want to be paid for it,” said entertainment analyst Jeffrey Logsdon. “This is a business now where you can become a star overnight and the pay that used to come over time comes immediately.”

For the studios, the stakes have never been higher. In a highly competitive market, with as many as six films debuting in multiplexes at the same time, studios are spending an average of $30 million to promote each one of them, hoping for big opening weekend grosses to help recoup their hefty investments.

Movies that do not take hold fade quickly.

Opening weekends also are crucial to studios because they get to keep a larger percentage of the box-office receipts under their deals with theater operators. For highly anticipated movies, which exhibitors know will sell more tickets and popcorn, the studios can use their leverage to keep as much as 70% of the proceeds during the first two weekends. Later, their cut can shrink to as little as 35%.

Some global franchises don’t need star power to draw crowds on their opening weekends. The phenomenal success of two movies last year was propelled by best-selling books--”Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.”

And, of course, George Lucas’ legendary “Star Wars” series is a cultural phenomenon whose good-versus-evil theme, colorful characters and special effects keep millions of hard-core fans coming back.

Still, there are plenty of movies that need marquee names--whether established or newly minted.

“The pressures to break through the clutter and open a movie is greater now than ever,” said Warner Bros.’ Horn. “Therefore, star value as a component of the decision-making process has greater weight than ever.”

Although lesser-known in Hollywood than the Rock or Vin Diesel, others have become beneficiaries, too.

Rap artist DMX, whose given name is Earl Simmons, got a multimillion-dollar, three-picture deal from Warner Bros. after he helped make the studio’s action movie “Exit Wounds” the top-grossing film on its opening weekend in March last year.

“The newcomers are emerging with a more accelerated pace than we were accustomed to in the past,” said Universal Pictures Vice Chairman Marc Shmuger. “Not only do we view them as brands, they view themselves that way and they understand what that means.”

The hunt for newcomers has become so frenetic that even actors with bad track records can get stunning pay hikes, merely on the chance that they are one hit away from breaking away from the pack.

Witness Colin Farrell, the handsome young Irish actor whose credits include the flops “Tigerland,” “American Outlaws” and most recently MGM’s “Hart’s War.”

But Spyglass Entertainment, which financed the supernatural powerhouse “The Sixth Sense,” sees something that audiences haven’t. The company thinks Farrell’s popularity will rocket this summer when he co-stars with Tom Cruise in another studio’s movie, “Minority Report,” directed by Steven Spielberg.

Based on that guess, Spyglass paid Farrell $5 million to star as a young CIA recruit opposite Al Pacino in the thriller “The Farm,” which will be released by Disney later this year.

“The logic is very simple,” said Spyglass Chief Executive Gary Barber. “It’s like buying stock or futures. It’s in anticipation of the price going up, and in a year’s time, it’s going to be worth more than it is today.”

But sometimes the market goes south.

Following the surprise success of her 1995 teen comedy “Clueless,” 18-year-old Alicia Silverstone landed a $10-million deal to star in and produce two movies for Columbia Pictures. Instantly, she became one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses.

Only one movie was made, “Excess Baggage,” and that died at the box office. She got $5 million. The studio got left holding the bag. Today, Silverstone is resurrecting her career on Broadway, playing Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, in “The Graduate.”

Hollywood executives who have been around long enough know that the high expectations surrounding hot new talent--so-called heat--can sometimes be a mirage.

“Heat is a tricky thing,” said 20th Century Fox Co-Chairman Tom Rothman. “Sometimes it can keep you warm, sometimes you can get burned.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Box-Office Muscle

Move over, Arnold, Bruce and Sly, Vin and the Rock are poised to make millions--for the studios and their promotional partners--off the action-hero franchise.

Vin Diesel

Real name: Mark Vincent

Born: New York, July 18, 1967

Paydays:

* $1 million, “The Fast and the Furious” (Universal Pictures, summer 2001)

* $200,000, “Knockaround Guy” (New Line Cinema, fall 2002)

* $2.5 million, “Diablo” (New Line Cinema, early 2003)

* $10 million, “XXX” (Columbia Pictures, Aug. 2)

* $12.5 million, “Pitch Black” sequel, “The Chronicles of Riddick” (Universal Pictures, to shoot this fall)

* $20 million guaranteed should sequel to “XXX” be made

The Rock

Real name: Dwayne Johnson