A maxim of the movie business is that worn-out film franchises cannot be rehabilitated on the side of the road. Once sequel fatigue sets in, they have to be towed into the shop and sold for scrap or fully retooled. That is what should have happened to The Fast and the Furious car-racing series five years ago when a third installment, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, stalled, selling about $62 million in tickets in North America, or fifty percent less than its predecessor. But Universal Pictures didn’t give up, and a souped-up fourth movie, Fast & Furious, showed surprising strength in 2009.Rico says he'll do his part, but he ain't seeing all these movies.
Over the weekend, a new entry, Fast Five, rocked Hollywood by selling almost $84 million in tickets, by far the biggest opening of the year and, if the prayers of movie moguls are answered, signaling the beginning of a box-office turnaround.
'Relieved' is one word Adam Fogelson, Universal’s chairman, used to describe his state of mind on Sunday morning. “We made a lot of very specific and very strategic choices that were not obvious.”
Studios and theater owners urgently need a big summer. Domestic box-office revenue has fallen fourteen percent in 2011, to about $3 billion, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles statistics on ticket sales. Higher prices, particularly for 3-D screenings, have probably kept some people at home. But the likeliest culprit is quality, which many studio executives concede has been lacking in a lot of releases.
The movie industry’s high-stakes summer season traditionally stretches from the first full weekend in May to Labor Day, when studios record about forty percent of their annual box office revenue. With Fast Five, Universal decided to stretch the period, using the marketing slogan “summer starts early”. Ticket sales easily surpassed the record for the weekend, set last year by A Nightmare on Elm Street, which took in $33 million.
Fast Five is an unusual sequel because of Universal’s fix-on-the-fly approach, but it is as good a marker as any of what the movie capital is counting on in the months ahead: sequels and more sequels. There are ten this time around, including Fast Five, more than there have been in any summer in recent memory.
“They’re stacked one after another after another, which will help give the marketplace momentum,” said Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com.Of these films, one in particular is expected to be a multiplex monster: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 from Warner Brothers. It is the first Potter film to be released in 3-D and finishes out the series.
Expectations are also high for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Walt Disney Studios), Kung Fu Panda 2 (DreamWorks Animation) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Paramount Pictures). Pixar’s Cars 2 doesn’t open until 24 June. but has already broken one record: the biggest array of related retail merchandise, beating Star Wars.
Hollywood is taking some enormous risks in the coming stretch. One of the biggest gambles is Green Lantern, a space opera that Warner hopes will put to rest criticisms about the degree to which it has mined its DC Comics library for movie characters. Early buzz has been mixed, with questions about the visual effects and the skin-tight costume and mask worn by its star, Ryan Reynolds.
“There is also the worry of superhero fatigue,” Mr. Contrino said, noting that Green Lantern will arrive after Marvel’s Thor and 20th Century Fox’s much-anticipated X-Men: First Class.
Another question mark is Cowboys & Aliens, an expensive genre mash-up starring an aging Harrison Ford. It’s an alien movie set in the Old West, and some industry experts fear it could fall flat. On the positive side, the companies behind this picture, DreamWorks Studios and Universal, recently released new marketing materials to positive response.
Nobody needs hits more than Universal, which, despite a few bright spots like Hop, was recently labeled “a bomb factory” by the entertainment news site Deadline.com. The studio has a new corporate parent, Comcast, which is watching to determine whether management changes are needed.
The Fast and the Furious franchise, which made its debut in 2001 as a counterculture car movie, underscores how hard Universal executives are trying.
Set in crime-ridden Los Angeles neighborhoods, the first film starred Vin Diesel as a ruthless street racer and hijacker. That movie, and its 2003 sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, were hits, generating a combined $440 million in global ticket sales. Then came the disappointing Tokyo Drift.
Universal thought about calling it a day. Taking encouragement from continued support for the series from Hispanic and African-American moviegoers, however, it brought back Mr. Diesel for a fourth movie (he had moved on after the first), and the result, Fast & Furious, was surprisingly strong: $353 million in global sales. But the studio still worried about sustainability. “We knew that we needed to try and grow the franchise, but that a certain group of people were never going to consider it because they dismissed it as a car movie,” Mr. Fogelson said.
So, together with the longtime producer of the franchise, Neal Moritz, executives made more changes. Fast Five was given a new antagonist, played by Dwayne Johnson, aka the Rock, and an international backdrop, Rio de Janeiro. Most notably, Universal changed the genre of the movie, making it a heist film along the lines of Ocean’s 11.
“It was definitely a high-wire act,” said Donna Langley, Universal’s co-chairwoman, of the genre shift. “You can’t alienate the core audience, and shifting the entire paradigm of an ongoing franchise is slightly uncharted territory.” Universal also took risks with the storyline, treating the series like a telenovela that takes absurd turns, including a character coming back from the dead. Universal and Mr. Moritz bet heavily on one ingredient: old-fashioned action sequences, the kind not reliant on computer-generated visual effects. “It turned out to be a competitive advantage,” Mr. Moritz said. “It allows us to stand out.”
The movie’s opening tally in North America was the biggest of any installment in the series. Overseas, where Fast Five has taken in an additional $81.4 million, sales are significantly outpacing those for the franchise’s fourth chapter. Universal said Fast Five cost $125 million after taking tax incentives and other financial credits into account.
Citing the warm critical reception for Fast Five, Mr. Moritz said he had hopes for the film’s continued success in the weeks ahead. About eighty percent of the reviews for Fast Five were positive, according to RottenTomatoes.com, which aggregates reviewer opinions. “For a summer action movie to get those kind of reviews,” Mr. Moritz said. “Wow.”
Definitely:Pirates of the Caribbean, Cowboys & Aliens (and why didn't Rico write that one?)
Probably: Fast Five, and a new version of The Three Musketeers that Rico knows nothing about:
No fucking way: Harry Potter, Cars, Kung Fu Panda, Transformers, Green Lantern, or X-Men
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