What Blockbusters Are Made Of
By RICHARD CORLISS
Handicapping Hollywood hits has its perils and pleasures. If, 18 months ago, you had publicly predicted that the top-grossing pictures of 1990 would be Home Alone, Ghost, Pretty Woman and Dances with Wolves, you could now be running the major studio of your choice. If, like most everyone, you had put your money on megabudget action adventures, you could be Frank Mancuso, who doesn't run Paramount Pictures anymore. Starting this month, the movie industry puts its snazziest fashions on display. The only thing certain about the product is that there will be more of it -- 50 films, by one count, compared with 35 last summer. In forecasting the winners, moviegoers and moguls will have five questions in mind:
WHO'S IN IT?
Stars are brand names: they sell tickets because they are the people we want to see and be. So the received wisdom says Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves will be a summer smash, not because Americans want a fantasy history lesson set in 12th century England but because Kevin Costner is running the show. Costner has made so many left-field hits lately (baseball movies, even westerns) that Hollywood figures he can do no wrong. It wants to forget that in between Field of Dreams and Dances with Wolves, he detonated a minibomb called Revenge.
WILL IT MAKE 'EM LAUGH OR CRY?
Tears streaming down cheeks or a grin from ear to ear equals good word of mouth. Last summer's surprise smash Ghost got 50 million moviegoers suitably weepy. So this summer's early line favored Dying Young, the Julia Roberts sudser about a former Candy Striper who falls in love with a failing patient. Hollywood had two nicknames for the film: Pretty Nurse and Can't Miss. But now second thoughts may be spoiling the party. 20th Century Fox has postponed the movie until late summer, and there's talk of changing both the downbeat ending and the title. To what, Pretty Sick? No. Forever Young.
For Hollywood, dying is hard but comedy is easy. The original Saturday Night Live wires have frayed lately, but Bill Murray will open the season with this week's psycho farce, What About Bob? Billy Crystal will dude it up out West in City Slickers, Martin Short will bank on Pure Luck, and John Candy will go Delirious. The easiest hit to pick is a farce sequel, The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear.
WHEN DOES IT COME OUT?
Last year Goldie Hawn's Bird on a Wire got the Memorial Day jump on the competition and galloped to a $70 million gross; Total Recall, the first brawnbuster released last June, beat out its beefy competition. So an early start is helpful. This Memorial Day weekend, Hudson Hawk, with Bruce Willis as a reformed thief forced to commit one last heist, will try to shoulder out Backdraft, director Ron Howard's fireman-buddy epic starring Kurt Russell and Robert De Niro. Maybe those two films will duke it out all summer. Or maybe they will cream each other and leave space for late May's gal-buddy movie, Thelma and Louise, with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. The success of T&L, or of Soapdish with Sally Field and Whoopi Goldberg, or of Warshawski with Kathleen Turner would mark the welcome infiltration of female-star vehicles in the boys' camp of summer movies.
HOW MUCH DID IT COST?
A movie budget shouldn't interest moviegoers; they pay the same ticket price for the cult hit Poison as they do for Godfather 3. But Hollywood went haywire last summer with action adventures, leaving the genre in a deep hole. And from that abyss crawls this year's budget behemoth, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Arnold Schwarzenegger got a $14 million jet as his salary, but even if he had worked for free, the movie would have cost more than $80 million, or about five times what the original Terminator brought its distributor. The early word is that the new picture is worth every penny, but movie execs dare to hope that T2 is the last of the spendthrift macho movies. It won't be.
THE HUH? FACTOR
As in, "I see that Home Alone is now the third highest-grossing picture of all time." Huh? Every summer has its sleepers. Even to list all the films that might be big this season, you'd need Marty McFly coming back from the future with, say, the Sept. 9 issue of Variety. So let's say The Rocketeer, Disney's no-star action fantasy, will ring the register. And Mike Nichols' Regarding Henry, with Harrison Ford as a lovelorn amnesiac. And Boyz N the Hood, a promising young director's first feature about gang bonding. And -- no, stop! This could take all summer.
With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Los Angeles