Word of Mouth: What will hit, miss and surprise in theaters this summer
Clothing designers have fashion week in New York. Car manufacturers, the auto shows in Detroit. When Hollywood wants to tout its upcoming wares, it heads to Las Vegas.
CinemaCon, as the just-concluded annual Nevada gathering of movie theater owners now calls itself, is part beauty pageant — a smattering of stars fly in to promote their films to the thousands of exhibitors on hand — and part trade show, with vendors such as American Licorice showing off their yummy new Natural Vines (in both red and black licorice) and Icee unveiling its not-too-sweet strawberry lemonade flavor.
It’s altogether fitting that most of the convention’s film presentations have been held just a few yards from the sports book at Caesars Palace, where bettors lay wagers on who will win far-off events such as the World Series, the Stanley Cup Finals and the NBA championship. Even though many of the movies being hawked at CinemaCon don’t open for months, exhibitors already are making bets on which movies they think will (and will not) be winners at the box office.
In years past, almost all of the major studios staged elaborate luncheons and dinners to plug their slates. This year, Disney, Warner Bros., DreamWorks Animation, Paramount, Marvel Studios, Lionsgate and DreamWorks Studios presented an array of trailers, clips and even several films in full, with Sony showing the Kevin James romantic comedy “Zookeeper” and Lionsgate screening its mixed martial arts movie “Warrior.”
Much of the selling was aimed at summer bookings.
From May through September, the major studios and big independents will introduce some three dozen movies in wide release, many of which open on the same weekends. Exhibitors seemed to think there were three movies that will clearly dominate the schools-out season: Warner Bros.’ “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2,” Paramount and Hasbro’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.”
The real CinemaCon test was in making the second tier of movies stand out from their brethren.
In many ways, the film clips were designed to draw distinctions — you may think our movie is this, but it’s really this. Pixar and Disney’s “Cars 2” isn’t an animated movie but a spy thriller. Paramount and Marvel Studios’ “Thor” may be about a Norse god comic-book figure, yet it’s actually funny. DreamWorks Animation’s “Puss in Boots” is more than a “Shrek” spin-off: It’s a Sergio Leone western that happens to star a talking cat. And DreamWorks Studio’s “Real Steel” might look like a movie about fighting robots, but don’t underestimate the father-son love story.
Who succeeded the best? J.J. Abrams showed about 20 minutes of “Super 8,” a period drama about young kids who stumble into an alien invasion (picture “Stand By Me” crossed with “Cloverfield”), that sparked a lot of exhibitor interest. DreamWorks Studios screened footage from “The Help” that it is confident will expand the film’s audience far beyond the millions of readers of the bestselling novel. And even National Geographic Films got into the act, bringing its inspirational drama “The First Grader” to Las Vegas to show theater owners that the film is not just a festival favorite but a crowd-pleaser as well.
But the best judge of what the movie business is excited about comes from the 6,000 convention guests themselves. The people on the Las Vegas ground this week — theater owners, distributors, filmmakers, studio executives and representatives from affiliated industries — are paid to know what audiences want.
We asked a variety of CinemaCon guests to pick the summer’s top-grossing film, its biggest bust and most popular sleeper. To encourage candor, they were promised anonymity — and told they couldn’t vote on their own movies. In many cases, they were basing their guesses on little more than their reaction to trailers, posters and plot summaries.
Here’s what they had to say:
Filmmaker
Hit: “Harry Potter”
Bomb: “Rise of the Apes”
Sleeper: “Zookeeper”
Actor
Hit: “Pirates of the Caribbean”
Bomb: “Conan the Barbarian”
Sleeper: “The Smurfs”
Exhibitor
Hit: “Pirates of the Caribbean”
Bomb: “Thor”
Sleeper: “Cowboys & Aliens”
Marketing executive
Hit: “Transformers”
Bomb: “Cowboys & Aliens”
Sleeper: “Crazy Stupid Love”
Theater cleaning company rep
Hit: “Pirates of the Caribbean”
Bomb: “Cowboys & Aliens”
Sleeper: “Zookeeper”
Concessionaire for beverages
Hit: “Pirates of the Caribbean”
Bomb: “Cowboys & Aliens”
Sleeper: “Zookeeper”
Exhibitor
Hit: “Transformers”
Bomb: “Captain America: The First Avenger”
Sleeper: “Super 8”
Film commissioner
Hit: “Harry Potter”
Bomb: “Thor”
Sleeper: “Fright Night”
Distributor
Hit: “Harry Potter”
Bomb: “Cowboys & Aliens” or “Rise of the Apes” or “Thor”
Sleeper: “Zookeeper”
Exhibitor
Hit: “Transformers”
Bomb: “Green Lantern”
Sleeper: “Super 8”
Studio executive
Hit: “Harry Potter”
Bomb: “Green Lantern” or “Captain America: The First Avenger”
Sleeper: “Super 8”
Concessionaire for candy
Hit: “The Hangover Part II”
Bomb: “The Smurfs”
Sleeper: “30 Minutes or Less”
Distributor
Hit: “Transformers”
Bomb: “Green Lantern”
Sleeper: “Super 8” or “Cowboys & Aliens”
Marketing executive
Hit: “Harry Potter”
Bomb: “Cowboys & Aliens”
Sleeper: “Friends With Benefits”
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