The summer of Hollywood’s discontent ended this weekend. Ticket sales were 17 percent lower than last summer. Only three movies — Rambo, Back to the Future and Cocoon — kept their momentum month after month.
Tri-Star’s Rambo, with $146 million in ticket sales, and Universal’s Back to the Future, with $128 million so far, are the summer’s only blockbusters. The rest of the top five movies include 20th Century-Fox’s Cocoon ($69 million), Warner Brothers’ Goonies ($61 million) and MGM-UA’s View to a Kill ($50 million).
There was an extraordinary number of high-budget disasters. Disney’s Return to Oz cost $28 million and sold $11 million worth of tickets. Since a movie’s distributor gets slightly less than 50 percent of the box-office revenues and since Disney had to spend about $6 million on prints and advertising for Return to Oz, that film may now be $29 million in the red.
Columbia’s $20 million Perfect was a box-office dud despite John Travolta. Paramount’s $25 million teen-agers-in-space movie, Explorers, and Cannon’s $25 million vampires-in-space film, Lifeforce, were also losers. Perfect grossed $13 million, Lifeforce, $11 million and Explorers, $9 million.
Less expensive to make but performing even worse at the box office were Disney’s My Science Project, Columbia’s Bride, Orion’s Secret Admirer and Heavenly Kid, MGM-UA’s Red Sonja and 20th Century-Fox’s Man With One Red Shoe.
Some money, however, will be made at theaters abroad. The foreign market has been shrinking, but violent action-adventure films can still smash through. Rambo already has broken records in 19 countries, and the producer of that $23 million Sylvester Stallone anthem about redeeming American pride by rescuing prisoners from Vietnam estimates that Rambo may gross as much as $150 million abroad. The James Bond movies usually make two-thirds of their money abroad, and A View to a Kill is not likely to be an exception.
There are also sales to pay cable and independent television stations and a growing afterlife on video cassette. John Huston’s adult comedy Prizzi’s Honor was a success for its producer, ABC Motion Pictures, and its distributor, 20th Century-Fox. With ticket sales of $24 million, it did respectably at the box office. In addition, because Prizzi’s Honor stars Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner and can be expected to appeal to the somewhat older people who go less often to movie theaters but own video cassette recorders, video cassette rights were sold for a huge $4.2 million.
There also is the question of how much a movie costs. Columbia’s Silverado was not a box-office failure. It has sold $27 million worth of tickets so far. The problem is that it cost $25 million, and another $8 million or $10 million was spent on prints and advertising. Columbia’s late-summer horror flick, Fright Night, has sold $22 million worth of tickets. Since it cost only $7 million, Fright Night will make the studio a nice profit.
Pale Rider will make a considerable amount of money for Warner Brothers because Clint Eastwood, who produces and often directs his own movies, is one of the few stars who is willing to share the risks with his studio. Pale Rider cost only $6.9 million, far below the industry average, because the actor — whom astounded Warner Brothers executives describe as “being as frugal with the studio’s money as if it were his own” — did not take a large salary. Eastwood gets a healthy share of the profits of his films. But if the movie — for example, 1982’s Honkytonk Man — doesn’t make money, he doesn’t make money either.
The big losers among the studios were Paramount, Disney and Columbia. Disney’s $25 million animated movie The Black Cauldron was another major disappointment. Columbia was salvaged only by the $33 million grossed by St. Elmo’s Fire, with its ensemble of trendy young actors who have been dubbed the “brat pack.”
Although Tri-Star will make a tidy profit from distributing Rambo, it went nowhere with The Legend of Billie Jean and Real Genius, or with Lifeforce, which it distributed for Cannon. And Tri-Star’s profits on Rambo are more limited than they would be if the studio had produced and financed the movie.
The big winners were Universal with Back to the Future, Fletch and Brewster’s Millions and Warner Brothers with The Goonies, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Pale Rider, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and the summer’s oddest movie, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. A throwback to the kinds of movies Jerry Lewis was making two decades ago, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is losing only 8 percent of its audience each week, a sign that people who have seen the film are urging their friends to see it, too.
Back to the Future is also holding its audience and, sometime in October, it will most certainly pass Rambo at the box office.
In contrast, European Vacation — for which Warner Brothers refused to hold the usual preview screenings — had a huge $12 million opening weekend and plummeted 40 percent its second weekend.
