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                                                                                CINEMA, Page 70

HOLLYWOOD GETS HOT

Summer 2: the Sequel


Big stars and recycled stories trigger another round of Honey,
I Blew Up the Budget. But on these pages, a sleeper smash is
hidden. Where's Wayne's World?

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York


    THE FIVE LIES OF A HOLLYWOOD SUMMER:

    1. The summer produces more hits than the winter. Wrong.
Summer (on the movie calendar, from Memorial Day to Labor Day,
give or take a week) can bring the major movie studios 40% of
their business, but during the past three years, more films
released in the winter (from mid-November through March) have
grossed in excess of $100 million domestically. The summer just
produces more predictable hits, mostly sequels. "Hollywood is
front loading the summer with blockbuster sequel products,"
notes Martin Grove, film analyst for the Hollywood Reporter,
"which virtually guarantees that the early summer business will
be strong." Lethal Weapon 3 leads the assault this weekend,
followed quickly by Alien 3 (May 22), the Red October sequel,
Patriot Games (June 5) and Batman Returns (June 19), the last
easily the season's most anticipated and expensive movie.

    A sequel usually costs more and earns less than the
original film, though Lethal Weapon 2 and last summer's top
finisher, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, bucked that trend
spectacularly. Batman Returns, like T2 before its release, is
now the subject of a whisper-down-the-lane campaign on its
sprawling budget ("It cost $70 million." "I heard 80. Who'll go
for 90?"). Says Variety reporter Charles Fleming: "The only way
you make money on a picture like this is if everybody in America
goes three times." But all will be forgotten if director Tim
Burton, who has turned dicey projects into hit movies, can do
it again. "Studios are paying more attention to the bottom
line," says Anne Thompson, industry maven for the L.A. Weekly,
"but they still spend a lot on these big locomotive items, the
sequels."

    2. Summer films are for kids, winter films for adults. Not
lately. This past winter played like the Nickelodeon Channel on
the big screen. The four $100 million-plus movies were based on
fairy tales (Beauty and the Beast, Hook) or kooky TV turns (The
Addams Family, Wayne's World). Rivals are looking at
Paramount's recent success with youth-oriented TV rip-offs
(Addams and Wayne's, plus the Star Trek and Naked Gun series)
and thinking seriously about green lighting retreads of reruns:
Gilligan's Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, even The Flintstones
with John Goodman as Fred. This summer's only TV spin-off may
gross less yet turn out to be more memorable than any of these:
David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Aug. 28).

    If winter is now for kids who like to watch TV in a movie
theater, summer is not necessarily for grownups. Social issues,
which rarely have an exalted place in Hollywood, shrivel in the
summer. Last summer's "serious" hit, Boyz N the Hood, made a lot
of money on a weenie budget but, judging from recent events,
didn't have much impact on the residents of South Central Los
Angeles, where the film was set and shot. Says Disney's movie
boss Jeffrey Katzenberg: "This is a time of trouble and concern,
yet I am also optimistic. Hollywood can make movies that can
speak to the issues we must now confront. We can also offer two
hours of fun and escape from those very pressures that must now
take priority in our lives."

    Basically, summertime is guy time. Males drag their dates
to the shoot-'em-ups and blow-'em-ups; and last year they made
City Slickers, the Billy Crystal comedy about male bonding on a
cattle drive, a gol-durned superhit. Will they flock to the
baseball comedy A League of Their Own (July 1), even though it's
about an all-girls' team? Will they sit still for Ron Howard's
transatlantic love story Far and Away (May 22), with Tom Cruise
and Nicole Kidman? "I worry whether it will have any male
appeal," says film analyst Grove of the 70-mm, $70 million
drama. "That could be a very big, expensive problem." The movie,
set in Ireland and the U.S. in the late 19th century, means to
have a David Lean sweep. But the one epic Lean filmed in Ireland
was Ryan's Daughter -- Erin go flop.

    3. Moviegoers are tired of action-adventure movies. No,
studio bosses are tired of making them. Macho mayhem still turns
the wickets: Terminator 2 and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
were last year's top money winners. The summer before, five
actioners (Total Recall, Another 48 Hours, Dick Tracy, Days of
Thunder and Die Hard 2) opened in five weeks -- overloading even
a male teenager's adrenaline system, it was thought -- and
pulled in an average of $100 million. People will pay to see
them, but studios don't want to pay the huge freight: $60
million or more, plus mammoth marketing campaigns. That's why
this summer, except for the behemoth sequels, looks to be the
most pacific in recent movie history. The moguls would rather
crank out a succession of $12 million teen-targeted comedies and
pray that one or two will hit the mark.

    So here comes Disney with Encino Man (May 22), in which
MTV Valley Dude Pauly Shore digs up a frozen caveman, and
Sister Act (May 29), with Whoopi Goldberg taking refuge from the
mob in Maggie Smith's convent. Encino Man is already touted as
"the Wayne's World of summer," and that's fine with Katzenberg,
who describes his mostly low-budget summer slate as "the
anti-800-lb.-gorilla school of film-making." Disney's only
expensive movie is, of course, a sequel: Honey, I Blew Up the
Kid.

    Also angling for kiddie cash are A Class Act, starring
Houseparty's Kid n' Play (June 5), the Ralph Bakshi cartoon
fantasy Cool World (July 10), Damon Wayans' Mo' Money (July 17),
Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, with Beverly Hills 90210's Luke Perry
(July 31) and Love Potion #9 (late August). The adult buried in
every child will have to make do with Steve Martin's Housesitter
(June 12).

    4. Stars on the screen put fannies in the seats. Sure, but
what's a star? Mel Gibson? In Lethal Weapon movies, but not in
Hamlet. Steve Martin? In Father of the Bride, but not in L.A.
Story. Over the past three years, only three actors -- Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Kevin Costner and Sean Connery -- have starred
in two $100 million-plus pictures. Just one performer has
starred in three. But Julia Roberts is taking the year off.

    Audiences typecast actors. They want to see Bruce Willis
and Sylvester Stallone in shirt-off action movies, not
button-down comedies. This summer Willis is playing a wreck
revived (remember, ahem, The Bonfire of the Vanities?) in Death
Becomes Her (July 31), a comedy about Americans' fear of aging.
With Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as dueling harridans, the
project suggests little appeal to kids. But director Robert
Zemeckis promises broad laughs and dazzling special effects to
keep everybody awake and amused.

    In Boomerang (June 26), Eddie Murphy also tries a change
of pace -- at his peril, according to Grove. "This film does
not present Murphy as a winner. It has him falling in love with a
girl [Robin Givens] who rejects him, so it may have a
weakness." But how weak can an Eddie Murphy movie be? Even his
flops earn $60 million to $80 million. And the last time he
played a romantic naif, in Coming to America, he made
megamillions.

    5. Blockbuster coming -- get out of the way! The
competition is stepping aside for Batman Returns: no other
studio movie opens that weekend. Does Hollywood think everybody
is going to just one movie on June 19? Have the bosses forgotten
the lesson of 1989, when brave little Disney opened Honey, I
Shrunk the Kids the same day that Batman opened and eventually
earned $130 million for the $10 million comedy? Mark Canton,
president of Columbia Pictures, hopes there is room for the long
shots, the Lil E. Tees, to sprint past the big-budget Arazis.
"Our films aren't supertankers," he says. "They're not obvious
movies. They don't have a prior history. But they've all tested
from Very Good to Through the Roof." Canton crosses his fingers
around A League of Their Own and Mo' Money. No doubt every other
mogul has a similar wish list.

    "Every summer," says Variety's Fleming, "and every spring
and winter, there's a picture that comes out of nowhere and is
a monster. Then, after the fact, all the people who were
concentrating on sequels and star vehicles say, `Oh, sure, I
knew it was going to be big.'" This summer again, the
fortune-tellers are using a rearview mirror instead of a crystal
ball. Everyone can be comforted in his ignorance by screenwriter
William Goldman's first rule of Hollywood: Nobody knows
anything.