Hollywood Gets Hot

By RICHARD CORLISS

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.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York