If It Worked Before, Do It Again

By RICHARD CORLISS

Every year when Americans celebrate Memorial Day, Hollywood launches its summer star wars. The big studios trot out their big names -- tough guys with flinty stares and handsome hair -- to swagger through apocalyptic fantasies. See cars blow up! See Mars blow up! See budgets and salaries go up! See the movies do anything but grow up, as long as moviegoers pay for the ride. Summer's here, and the time is right for filling up the seats.

Last year for the first time the summer box-office revenue topped $2 billion. The surge was led by Batman, which cost $50 million to produce but brought in $251 million at the domestic wickets to rank as the fourth all-time movie hit. Not far behind -- at $197 million, ninth on the all-time list -- was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a gilt-edged sequel. These successes seemed to validate the rules that Hollywood likes to play by: bet big to win big; and if it worked before, do it again.

So this year the moguls spent $55 million to send Tom Cruise around a racetrack in Days of Thunder, $65 million to launch Arnold Schwarzenegger into outer space for Total Recall, $70 million to help Bruce Willis save a besieged airport in Die Hard 2. The industry would pay any price, detonate any explosion, inflate any body count to meet its megahit expectations.

So far, Gold Rush II hasn't quite happened. Nobody will go broke; some actors, directors and producers are raking in fees that would make Jose Canseco envious. But the ticket lines are shorter. Variety's Art Murphy, grand statmaster of movie grosses, projects this summer's take as $1.85 billion, down 9% from last year's. Total Recall has already earned more than $105 million, and Dick Tracy and Die Hard 2 could earn that and more before Labor Day. But other pictures have already started to run out of steam, especially pricey sequels like Another 48 Hrs., RoboCop 2, Gremlins 2: The New Batch and Back to the Future, Part III.

Audiences are queuing up each weekend for the new blockbuster, then spurning it for next week's thrill machine. Why? Because, with minor variations, each film is the same film; each is a sequel to the others. They offer the same kinds of villains (terrorists and corporate thugs), the same spectacular stuntmanship, the same jolts within the narrowest band of Hollywood entertainment. They are fables about little boys with big toys. Feel-good is not the feeling; these are workout pictures that, taken in large doses, wear the moviegoer out. Viewers don't get massaged, they get rolfed. And because the films finally blur together, none may have the "legs," the staying power, of last summer's hits.

Or even of this spring's. March is normally a sluggish month at the box office, but this year three films -- Pretty Woman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Hunt for Red October -- each pulled in summer-worthy figures of well over $100 million. Disney's Pretty Woman, an airhead Cinderella comedy that speaks to every man's dream of buying a beautiful woman and every woman's fantasy of a Rodeo Drive shopping spree, is near $160 million and still going strong. It stands a good chance of becoming the first film since Blazing Saddles in 1974 to win the year's box-office race without having been released in the summer or Christmas seasons. "It's out of date," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, "this idea that there are 12 golden weeks of summer and two golden weeks of winter. We are now a 52-weeks- a-year business."

This year business executives must look to midsummer releases for a word-of- mouth smash. If nearly all the June movies could be called Total Recall (so reminiscent are they of previous action hits), the films of July and August could be labeled Presumed Interesting. Moviegoers are looking for something different, and they may have already found it in the postmortem romantic thriller Ghost or the eye-spider horror comedy Arachnophobia. Presumed Innocent hopes to corner the serious market. Even David Lynch is invading summertime with his bizarro-world Wild at Heart. Each hopes to duplicate the surprise-hit status of last summer's When Harry Met Sally, Dead Poets Society, Parenthood and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

But does it matter whether they ring up gigantic grosses at the U.S. box office? Not really, because the biggest business is elsewhere. "The film theater is very visible," says Variety's Murphy. "It is the launch pad, and the big hit there is the big hit in all markets -- in videocassettes, in pay, cable, network and syndicated TV, and in all those markets around the world." Murphy notes that 10 years ago, theater grosses represented 80% of worldwide revenues; today they are only 30%. "And even taking out inflation, 30% of the 1990 pie is bigger than 80% of the 1980 pie." So there is less riding on the weekly theatrical tally. A film's main job is to establish itself as something the public wants to consume in the future, where the real money is. This long shelf life can persuade a studio to pay $3 million for a screenplay and $20 million to a star like Sylvester Stallone. "These artists get so much," says Murphy, "because their agents know there is home video in Borneo and it's coming to Singapore."

Moviegoers, of course, don't pay for the cost of a movie. They are as likely to spurn a megamovie as they are to embrace a pinchpenny picture like Ninja Turtles. But for now, moguls are willing to believe that the VCR revolution has made the movie industry slump-proof; 1990 may not match last summer, but it should still be the second biggest-grossing summer ever. And viewers may dare to hope that amid the bigger bangs for bigger bucks, Hollywood doesn't forget how to make good movies.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Steve Hart

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Variety}]CAPTION: A TALE OF TWO SUMMERS

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York