Brand Blvd.

Last week The Times surveyed the year in showbiz with two stories, cheek by jowl, one about the movie business’ box-office revenues, the other about the record industry’s top concert grosses and album sales. As good as the stories were, the real revelation came from their illustrations. The photos of the music industry’s top hitmakers showed flesh ‘n’ blood pop stars. The photos of the year’s five top-grossing movies didn’t have a movie star in the bunch. They were iconic figures: Shrek, Spiderman, Mr. Incredible, Jesus Christ and Harry Potter.

That’s the real story of today’s movie business. It’s not about the movies, it’s about the brands. In today’s Hollywood, where marketing expenses are growing so fast they may someday outstrip production costs, studios increasingly rely on franchises and sequels propelled by brand awareness and instantly identifiable visual iconography. Fifteen of the last year’s 25 top-grossing films were projects based on books, comics, old movies and TV shows or sequels to previous films.

2004 was no fluke. The new year is crammed with more remakes and spinoffs. Sony, just to pick one studio, has remakes of “Bewitched,” “Prom Night” and “Fun With Dick and Jane,” along with sequels to “Deuce Bigalow,” “Mask of Zorro” and “Underworld.” This spirit of retro culture is hardly limited to the movie business. Two weeks ago, the music business’ top-selling CD was a collection of songs by Tupac Shakur, an artist who’s been dead for nearly a decade. Ray Charles, who died last summer, just sold 2 million copies of “Genius Loves Company,” a collection of duets with (Norah Jones excepted) a host of aging artists. The fastest-growing segment of the DVD business last year was the sale of old TV show collections. Even art directors are digging into the recycling bin. When Entertainment Weekly put Lindsay Lohan on the cover last month, her coyly naked pose was an evocation of a notorious 1960s photo of Swinging London tart Christine Keeler. In the ad world, you can’t buy a watch without being hustled by a dead movie star. The current Longines campaign (“Elegance is an attitude”) is anchored to a photo of Humphrey Bogart, while Steve McQueen is the pitchman for the new “What are you made of?” ads for TAG Heuer.

Hollywood’s embrace of brands even extends to the Oscar race, the one area where original drama, not retro chic, once reigned supreme. Many of this year’s contenders are biopics, meaning that even to make a run for an Oscar you need a sexy historical figure (Howard Hughes, Ray Charles or Alfred Kinsey) to grab some attention. Without the hot flash of originality, which now comes from such incubators as hip-hop, HBO and video games, the movie business is rapidly losing its status as our dominant form of pop culture. It’s hardly a surprise that the only two movies compelling enough to spark a national conversation last year were “The Passion of the Christ” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” films no major studio would touch.

“We’re all doing remakes and sequels because at least it gives your movie a little sticking power,” says Terry Press, head of marketing at DreamWorks. “If you can get someone to say, ‘Oh, “Bewitched,” I’ve heard of that,’ you’ve at least attached yourself to one memory brain cell. There’s just too much entertainment out there. Instead of going to a movie, I can watch the first season of ‘Arrested Development’ over three nights -- and I can do it either through TiVo or by buying the DVD. It’s become a Herculean endeavor to get people out to see a movie today.”

Outside of Ben Stiller, Will Smith and Brad Pitt, few movie stars earned their $20-million paychecks last year. Worse still, in an era of media overkill, rising stars risk being overexposed before they can establish any intimacy or connection with their audience. Just ask Scarlett Johansson -- when you’re on the cover of 40 magazines after your first big success, the public doesn’t get to feel that it’s part of the discovery process. That said, virtually every major studio made money last year, thanks to DVD sales and a global box-office surge; “Troy,” for example, grossed nearly three times as much overseas ($363 million) as it did in the U.S. What follows is my 2004 Studio Report Card, which offers two grades: first for box-office performance, second for film quality. The accompanying illustration features the studios’ grades. See the box on Page 6 for a look at the studios’ specialty divisions.

Warner Bros.

You’re never going to see this relentlessly bottom-line studio’s middle-brow releases high on the critic top-10 lists, but when it comes to cultivating franchises and limiting risk, as well as exploiting the booming international market, this well-oiled machine is hard to beat. The studio had its flops, notably “Catwoman” and “Alexander” (though it only put up a third of the latter’s budget), but it’s profiting around the globe from the latest “Harry Potter” sequel, “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Troy.” Warners never gave up on “The Polar Express,” which despite doomsday predictions from analysts (myself included) ended up as the year’s 10th highest-grossing film.

Grade: Performance: A. Quality: C+.

Sony

With the exception of one costly misfire (“Spanglish”) and the year’s biggest PR fiasco (“Spiderman” logos on the bases at major league ballparks), this studio made a string of hits, although it didn’t have the kind of overseas performance some of its rivals achieved. Still Sony raked in profits, not only from “Spiderman 2” but also from an Adam Sandler comedy (“50 First Dates”) and genre films that will make even more money in video. They include “The Grudge,” a $10-million thriller that (thanks to a canny marketing campaign) grossed $110 million in the U.S. alone, and “Resident Evil: Apocalypse,” a sequel that outperformed its original.

Grade: Performance: A-. Quality: B-.

20th Century Fox

The studio had its most profitable year ever, eclipsing even the year it made “Titanic.” The critics rightfully teed-off on the studio’s dumb and dumber fare, but Fox kept a laser-like focus on delivering films that perform best overseas and on video, the industry’s two growth areas. “I, Robot” and “The Day After Tomorrow” were enormous hits everywhere. Fox also gambled on “DodgeBall,” which was developed, then abandoned, by DreamWorks. The studio turned it into a PG-13 comedy, promoted it endlessly (with studio co-head Tom Rothman juggling dodgeballs on stage at ShoWest) and made it on the cheap, persuading Ben Stiller to take a small salary in return for a piece of the profits, which are still pouring in.

Grade: Performance: A. Quality: C-.

DreamWorks

The industry is still puzzling over whether this will remain a full-fledged studio or become a glorified production company, but Jeffrey Katzenberg delivered last year, hitting a grand slam with “Shrek 2” and outperforming expectations with “Shark Tale.” The misfires (“Eurotrip,” “Envy” and “Surviving Christmas”) were balanced out by a solid Will Ferrell showing (“Anchorman”) and a classy outing (“Collateral”) from Tom Cruise and director Michael Mann.

Grade: Performance: B+. Quality: B-.

Universal

It was a rocky year for the studio, though it remains the industry’s favorite place to do business, thanks to its decisive production executives and crack marketing team. More fiscally cautious than ever, the studio pulled the plug on “American Gangster,” though it meant eating $30 million in talent commitments. The studio had huge hits with two sequels, “Meet the Fockers” and “The Bourne Supremacy”; is in the Oscar race with “Ray”; and has another foreign hit with its “Bridget Jones” sequel, which could make five times more overseas than it did here. But the studio stumbled with “Chronicles of Riddick,” underperformed with “Van Helsing” and wiped out with the Working Title-produced “Thunderbirds.”

Grade: Performance: B-. Quality: B.

Disney

After a disastrous first half full of costly failures, led by “The Alamo,” “Hidalgo” and “King Arthur,” the studio rebounded with two big hits, “National Treasure” and Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” which will be mega-performers in DVD. While the studio succeeded in expanding the Disney family-film brand, its willingness to bet on young filmmakers backfired, with failures from such gifted directors as John Lee Hancock, Wes Anderson (who made “The Life Aquatic,” a $50-million art film) and Jeff Nathanson, whose “The Last Shot” barely got a theatrical release.

Grade: Performance: C+. Quality: B-.

Paramount

Morale is up, thanks to an influx of fresh executive talent, but despite ardent cheerleading from outgoing chief Sherry Lansing, last year provided little cause for optimism -- incoming studio chief Brad Grey has inherited a rusty jalopy in need of an overhaul, not a tune-up. Paramount simply isn’t hitting the long ball; it didn’t have one movie in the year-end top 20. The few successes, notably “Mean Girls,” “Manchurian Candidate” and “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events,” were offset by awful remakes (“Alfie” and “The Stepford Wives”) and a roster of films that performed poorly overseas.

Grade: Performance: C-. Quality: C-.

Miramax

In what could be his swan song at the studio he founded with his brother Bob, Harvey Weinstein spent the year fighting with Michael Eisner and evangelizing for “Fahrenheit 9/11.” With Disney cutting off the flow of funds, things were so slow that Dimension, Miramax’s genre wing, released only one movie while Miramax’s production chief took the summer off. The studio did a great job with Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” and has a pair of quality Oscar entries with “The Aviator” and “Finding Neverland,” but for a studio that prides itself on its passion for film, there was less ardor here than in recent memory.

Grade: Performance: C-. Quality: B.

New Line

If only “Lord of the Rings” had been a quartet instead of a trilogy, it wouldn’t have been such a lean year at New Line, which hasn’t launched a new franchise in a lo-o-ong time. Outside of one low-budget hit, “The Butterfly Effect,” and a solid success with “The Notebook,” the pickings were slim, especially after the studio bungled “After the Sunset,” allowing the heist film to balloon into a $60-million flop. The lackluster showing of “Blade: Trinity” puts production chief Toby Emmerich under more pressure than ever to speed the arrival of a new comedy or horror hit, the studio’s two most reliable genres.

Grade: Performance: D+. Quality: C-.

MGM

Say sayonara to the fabled Leo the Lion, who’s going out with a whimper, not a roar, after the company was purchased by Sony -- clearly for its library, not for its forgettable current projects. Except for “De-Lovely,” the studio’s artistic ambitions seemed on a par with Bob Dylan’s Victoria’s Secret ad, with its modest success coming from the sequel “Barbershop 2” and a remake of “Walking Tall.”

Grade: Performance: D. Quality: C-.

The Big Picture appears in Calendar on Tuesdays. Comments and suggestions can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

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Specialty divisions

The year’s top specialty company was Fox Searchlight, which not only released critics’ delights (“Sideways” and “Kinsey”) but also consistently made money on a variety of films, from “Napoleon Dynamite” to “Johnson Family Vacation.” ... Lions Gate was also impressive, helping make “Fahrenheit 9/11” an event while shrewdly marketing genre hits like “Saw” and “Open Water.” ... Focus released gems like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Motorcycle Diaries” while pursuing genre pictures like “Seed of Chucky.” ... Newmarket did a great job handling “The Passion of the Christ” while carefully setting up the provocative “The Woodsman.” ... Sony Classics had the best foreign films, including “House of Flying Daggers,” “Bad Education” and “Good Bye Lenin.” ... Fine Line had a trio of critic favorites: “The Sea Inside,” “Vera Drake” and “Maria Full of Grace.” ... United Artists released two provocative films, “Saved” and “Hotel Rwanda.” ... And Warner Independent debuted with several quality films, notably “Before Sunset.”