Sequels are fish food

It’s a pretty scary proposition, but is it possible that the average 16-year-old has better taste in movies than most of the rich, Ivy League-educated studio executives who’ve flooded us with a deluge of movie sequels this summer?

Ever since the arrival of “The Matrix Reloaded” in mid-May, which was a box office success but a huge disappointment to most fans and critics alike, the retread market has taken a nasty bearish turn. Consider the numbers:

* The Fourth of July weekend, which featured the release of two new sequels, “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” and “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde,” was a big disappointment, as the box office dropped 15% from last year’s numbers. “Terminator 3” not only fell considerably short of last year’s Fourth of July sequel, “Men in Black 2,” but in terms of actual admissions, it didn’t even match the 1991 opening of “Terminator 2.”

* After an embarrassing $37-million opening weekend, “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” dropped 62% last weekend, despite weeks of mind-bending media hype.

* “The Hulk” dropped off a horrific 70% in its second weekend, the worst drop for a No. 1 movie ever. It had another big drop this past weekend. The failure of “The Hulk” reinforces the suspicion that young moviegoers viewed the film as a less-than-compelling sequel to such Marvel epics as “Spider-Man” and “X Men.”

It was quite a June swoon for other retreads too. “Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd,” a crass stab at making a crasser version of the original, bombed. “Rugrats Go Wild,” a feeble attempt to kick-start a fading kids franchise, barely made a box-office dent, nor did “Hollywood Homicide,” which though not a sequel, felt like “Buddy Cop Film No. 83.” “From Justin to Kelly,” a quasi-sequel to a TV reality show, hardly registered in its opening weekend -- and then dropped off an astounding 77%. Even “2 Fast 2 Furious,” despite an impressive opening weekend, is fading so fast that it won’t do as much business as the original, a lackluster showing for a film that cost twice as much.

The pall of sequel overload is everywhere. Always keenly attuned to the pop zeitgeist, Entertainment Weekly has been running a poll on its Web site, asking fans to select “What summer movie is the biggest disappointment so far?” Three of the four leaders are sequels. Even Variety weighed in with an editorial, saying that if the sequel-packed summer had a title, it would be “The Audience Strikes Back,” asking “could it possibly be that Hollywood has finally eaten too much of the devil’s candy?”

Many industry experts are gloomy. “There’s something really wrong right now,” says Terry Press, the marketing chief at DreamWorks, whose new animated film, “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” had a grim five-day holiday opening, only making about $10 million. “There’s $2 billion worth of movies yet to come, and if something doesn’t jump-start the summer there’s going to be a lot of disasters.”

The reason box office isn’t down even more is that moviegoers have eagerly sought out films that offered a modicum of originality. Hits so far include “Finding Nemo,” which has already topped “The Matrix Reloaded” as the year’s highest-grossing film; “Bruce Almighty”; “Daddy Day Care”; “The Italian Job” (a remake that actually stood on its own); and “28 Days Later,” an $8.7-million horror thriller that has already made $20 million in its first 10 days of release.

The only sequel that profited from consistent word of mouth was “X2: X-Men United,” which had an emotionally involving story to tell, something missing from the flyweight “Charlie’s Angels,” whose narrative arc seems determined largely by its actresses’ fondness for costume changes.

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‘28 Days’ breaks out

I knew something was up when I asked the teenage boys in my neighborhood what they’d thought of “The Hulk” and the “Angels” film, only to discover, much to my amazement, that they hadn’t bothered to see either film. Gabe, a 16-year-old who lives across the street, has seen every Marvel comic-based movie but skipped “The Hulk.” Instead, he went to see Pixar/Disney’s “Nemo” (twice) and Fox Searchlight’s “28 Days Later.”

When a 16-year-old action-movie fan goes with his male pals to see an animated film -- more than once -- and a no-name horror movie, somehow ignoring millions of dollars of marketing hype touting the Big Event movies, you know something is really amiss.

According to conventional wisdom, Fox Searchlight had no business putting its low-budget horror movie up against movies like “Hulk” and “Angels,” which supposedly had more brand-name identification and far more money to spend on a marketing campaign. But Searchlight shrewdly gambled that it could steal a lot of young males away from “Angels.” The studio also knew it had a marketing weapon of incalculable power -- a movie that felt fresh.

It spent $1 million on Internet advertising, largely on banner ads geared at steering fans to see the movie’s trailer. It had sneak previews for the film in 28 cities on June 13. Nearly every showing was packed, with 40% of the tickets -- an amazing percentage -- sold online. That started the best word of mouth of all: fans e-mailing their friends, telling them what a cool movie they’d seen.

Searchlight didn’t spend a dime on network TV ads; its cable TV spots showcased the film’s glowing reviews (there’s something that sets you apart, a summer movie with good reviews). By the time the movie opened, traffic was so high on its Web site that its server crashed.

“We didn’t try to duke it out with ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ ” says Searchlight marketing chief Nancy Utley. “We thought we could go after the audience no one was feeding -- cool, Internet-oriented guys who weren’t being satisfied by the bigger Hollywood fare.”

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Looking for emotion

That’s what has the studio brass scratching its collective head: Why is our core audience, which in the past has been all too willing to show up like lambs for the slaughter if we sold a movie hard enough, suddenly rebelling, or at least playing hard to get?

One key reason is that most of the Big Event movies have lost any glimmer of individuality. The problem isn’t just that they’re sequels, but that they’re all bulked-up, 1950’s-style B-movies, crawling with sci-fi mutants, cyborgs, military experiments gone awry, drag racing and Vargas-like pinup girls. Even “The Matrix Reloaded,” for all its futuristic visual effects, was weighted down with the kind of pseudo-intellectual blather that would’ve been at home in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series of ‘50s sci-fi novels.

Don’t get me wrong -- teen filmgoers dig cheap thrills and they’ll come out in droves for movies like the upcoming “Bad Boys 2” that promise to deliver them. But nothing robs a pop event of its mystique like repetition. The motto of most sequels seems to be: Why do it when you can overdo it? Why fight one Agent Smith when you can battle 100?

Too many of this summer’s sequels feel as if they’ve been dosed with cinematic Creatine, from the oversized high-tech weaponry and screeching decibel levels to the muscle-bulging bodies of the stars, be it Arnold in “T3,” Tyrese in “2F2F” or Carrie-Anne Moss in “Matrix,” who looks like she could beat up Madonna, or at least Demi Moore. If there’s any one good reason why “Charlie’s Angels” tanked, perhaps it’s because teenage boys were frightened away by Moore, who at 40 was nearly as old as their moms but looked more muscular than they did.

But even young moviegoers crave more than pure sensation. They want heroes who have an emotional vulnerability to accompany their special-effects swagger. “The studios have misread what movies teenage boys want to see,” says ICM agent Robert Newman, who represents Baz Luhrmann, Robert Rodriguez and “28 Days Later” director Danny Boyle. “It’s not about the blue-screen spectacle. Kids are going to see ‘Finding Nemo’ for the same reason they went to see ‘Spider-Man’ or ‘Titanic.’ They relate to the unabashed romance and emotion and the complexity of the characters. That’s what makes you want to go see a movie again and again.”

The people who run movie studios aren’t dumb. But they’ve fallen into the habit of underestimating their most devoted fans. It’s a dispiriting strategy that has resulted in some embarrassing busts this summer, and it’s safe to say more are on the way. This summer, moviegoers are opting for originality over familiarity, which is good news for good movies and bad news for the ones that cynically stoop to conquer.

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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.