Oh, boy. Let’s see on June 2nd, we had this article from THR: “Are moviegoers tiring of sequels”?
Hollywood still hopes to shake off early symptoms, but there is spreading concern that the summer boxoffice will be plagued by a nasty case of sequelitis.
Conditions are ripe: Studios have planted 11 sequels or franchise reboots in the fertile May-August span, up from nine last summer and seven from the 2008 season. But those opened so far have underwhelmed, with seasonal boxoffice off by a double-digit margin and studio executives beginning to feel woozy.
On June 3rd, there was this article asserting that the problem with the sucky summer box office was not enough sequels.
Summer 2010 always looked soft from a distance. Why? Because of a lack of sequels [emphasis added]. No Spider-Man, Batman, Transformers, Bourne, or Harry Potter.
Later that week, Patrick Goldstein weighed in with this:
So why the cold shoulder from audiences? This is the time of year when all we hear about are the remakes and sequels and rebooted franchises coming off the studio assembly lines. But the real problem with this summer’s box office is that it hasn’t spawned a really good original movie, since it’s the original movies — like last year’s “The Hangover,” “Up” and “The Proposal” — that bring a broader swath of eager new moviegoers into the theaters [emphasis added]. In fact, the movies from the first week of June in 2009 and 2008 that would’ve finished ahead of “Shrek” were all original films — “Up” and “The Hangover” from 2009, “Kung Fu Panda” and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” from 2008.
Perhaps Goldstein is right as this shockingly hopeful article from the Vulture suggests:
Conventional wisdom in Hollywood of late has said that you should stick to familiar brands when making movies. It could be a sequel or an adaptation of an old TV show, board game, toy, or crumpled candy wrapper, just as long as people already know it. So how’s that working out? In a summer season where only three out of the fourteen major releases so far have come from a new idea, attendance is down 13.3 percent from last season. Even with The Karate Kid’s surprise bounty, box-office revenue is down 7.5 percent, according to the National Association of Theater Owners … and that is skewed more by 3-D gouging than anything else: Since the summer of 2009, ticket prices have actually gone up 8 percent. That’s why studio execs at Warner Bros., Paramount/DreamWorks, and Universal are now madly pinging agents and managers with an uncharacteristic, desperate, and welcome request: Send us your fresh material!
“We’re on a lot of calls with people at the highest level [of production], and they’re just nervous,” one agent tells Vulture. “They’ve been telling us, ‘We have our movies for next year, but attendance is down, so, guys, you know what? Get us the original material. We need some original shit, because now our bosses are on us.’” It’s no wonder panic is in the air, considering how moviegoers are rebelling. “People are feeling marketed to, as opposed to catered to,” says JC Spink, a partner in the management and production company Benderspink and one of the executive producers of last summer’s surprise original hit, The Hangover. “I think we’ve all gone a little bit overboard as an industry. There hasn’t been room for original material for a little while now. It’s a shame, because I don’t think it’s what anyone [who works in the business] came out here for.”
Wait a second. Could that be… [sniff, sniff]… the smell of spec script money in the air? Since the start of the summer box office, there have been 6 spec script sales:
The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman
Four of those sales have taken place since the beginning of June.
What does all that mean?
Go write that spec script!
HT to GITS reader Mike Allen for the Vulture link via Julie Gray.
A glimmer of hope on the horizon.