At their best, Roland Emmerich's movies capture the public's imagination and blow up big (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow). At their worst, they merely blow up (Godzilla). In both cases, the director's outsize ambitions have made for movies that verge on military campaigns — and his battleground has always been summer. Emmerich's latest movie, 10,000 BC, is a wee little thing about a prehistoric hunter and herds of stampeding mammoths. It too was supposed to be a warm-weather behemoth. But the film's elaborate visual effects — including all that pixelated woolly hair — proved so taxing that the production couldn't make its original July 27, 2007, opening. So the executives at Warner Bros. suggested a new war plan. ''They said, 'We just did very well with 300,''' recalls Emmerich, referring to the sword-clanging epic that made a record-breaking $70.9 million when it debuted on a March weekend last year. '''We could put 10,000 BC on the same date.'''
Not long ago, a director who'd been told that his film was moving to spring would have felt his stomach sink, followed immediately by his box office. Spring has traditionally been where studios sent movies to die quietly (see: 15 Minutes, The Ninth Gate, Hanging Up, Sphere — or, better yet, don't). But Emmerich could not have been happier. ''I actually like March better,'' he says. January, February, and March have finally overcome their wasteland reputation, growing into as potent a box office season as any other. The transformation started gradually, when movies like Hannibal (2001), Ice Age (2002), and Daredevil (2003) drummed up huge first-week numbers previously unheard of in the first quarter. ''When studios see movies break out in a time period,'' explains Paramount Pictures vice chairman Rob Moore, ''they get very comfortable.'' The high-profile hits — 50 First Dates, Hitch, Ice Age 2 — just kept coming, culminating last year with Wild Hogs' and Ghost Rider's impressive $40 million openings and 300's mind-boggling bow.
In less than 10 years, all this box office bounty has nearly doubled the season's average top weekend gross, giving birth to a new breed of blockbuster: The Post-Christmas Event Movie. ''Martin Luther King Day, Presidents' Day, and the pre-Easter spring-break period have all turned into good moviegoing weekends,'' says Moore. March is especially fertile territory. Thanks to spring break, big effects-driven movies like 300 and 10,000 BC keep the box office churning for weeks as college and high school students — and their families — take week-long vacations throughout the month. In a way, it's like a mini-summer.
NEXT PAGE: ''If they advertise a [spring] movie right, it [can be] like another Christmas.''
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