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LOS ANGELES - Get ready for a season of sequels.
Starting with Spider-Man 3, and ending with New Line's Rush Hour 3, the northern summer's movie schedule is stacked with high-profile releases that are expected to fill theatres and get cash registers cranking.
Among the other films that are expected to get the record mojo going: Paramount-DreamWorks' Shrek the Third; Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Warner Bros.' Ocean's Thirteen and Sony's Surf's Up; Fox's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Universal's Evan Almighty.
The hit parade continues with Disney-Pixar's Ratatouille, Paramount's Transformers, Warner Bros.' Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, New Line's Hairspray and Fox's The Simpsons Movie.
"Lines beget lines," says Chuck Viane, Disney's domestic distribution president. "You get people in there seeing the trailers for the fall movies and one thing triggers another. That's the really great thing about our business. When we're on a roll, there's a snowball effect."
If the summer of 2007 lives up to expectations, it could turn out to be the biggest in US box office history, shattering the record held by the summer of 2004, when 557.4 million admissions generated roughly US$3.5 billion in revenue during the 15 week period between Memorial Day and Labour Day.
Each studio has a couple of potential summer blockbusters, but could there be too much of a good thing? In the past, there has been more "breathing room" between films, a studio executive posits, wondering if the titles will step on each other's shelf life. "It will be interesting to see if this is a summer where we open big for a week then go away quickly."
But while the studios might fret the fate of individual films, the sheer number of big films opening seems to make it a no-lose situation for theatre owners.
Conscientious effort on the part of theatre owners to upgrade the moviegoing experience is also helping. theatres have been upgrading to more comfortable seating and lobby environments as well as in technical areas like sound, digital projection and 3-D.
"There's a lot of good intentions to enhance the moviegoing experience," says DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. "I've met with many people on that side of the business and found them ambitious about innovating."
- REUTERS/Hollywood Reporter
