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Remember that delicious powerball fantasy you dreamed up earlier this summer? How much would it have taken to quit your job and book that trip to the Seychelles -- $250 million? $100 million? Face it, you'd have danced the lambada for a couple of twenties and some quarters for the laundry.
If only it were that easy to satisfy Hollywood. The good news is that a record nine of the summer's top movies have already pushed past the $100 million mark. The bad news is eight of those nine films (all but the bargain-basement blockbuster There's Something About Mary) cost at least $80 million to make and market. In short, the old gauges of box office triumph have come unsprung. In an era when Titanic can gross $600 million, ''you can't use the $100 million figure as a sign of success anymore,'' says Larry Gleason, MGM's distribution president. ''It just doesn't mean anything on its own.''
Mary was an exception to this summer's rules in ways other than its low cost; it was one of the few films driven by grassroots audience reaction rather than by marketing, rising from fourth place in its first week to second place in its seventh. And it may have been the season's only old-fashioned major-studio smash -- the kind that returns a profit before overseas revenues and video sales kick in. But what's troubling is that movies that would have looked like blockbusters a few years back -- Godzilla, Lethal Weapon 4, even Armageddon -- suffered from overblown budgets, poor reviews, and a widespread media-fueled perception that pre-summer expectations weren't being met. ''I'm not proclaiming success on the bottom line, but it's nice to have the market share,'' says Buena Vista distribution president Phil Barlow, which is his way of noting that the biggest movie of the summer, Armageddon, is now the 27th-highest domestic grosser of all time -- and given that less than half of that money is typically returned to the studio, that's still not enough to make a huge profit.
So what worked? ''The 'big' films this summer weren't the ones people wound up talking about,'' says Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman Bill Mechanic. Instead, people were buzzing about the surprises. Nobody ever expected a solemn, R-rated, nearly three-hour combat film -- even one directed by Steven Spielberg -- to approach $200 million. Nobody picked Dr. Dolittle to talk its way past Godzilla, or guessed that a risky, high-minded project like The Truman Show would wind up one of the top 100 grossers ever. And who'd have predicted that testicle jokes and the sight of a yappy dog in a body cast could turn a $24 million gas-terpiece like There's Something About Mary into the party of the year?
''The industry went a whole other way this summer,'' says Amy Pascal, president of Columbia Pictures. ''In the past, we'd depend on explosions and dinosaurs and an audience of young males to get us through Labor Day. This summer, people wanted something else. They wanted to laugh in ways they haven't laughed before, feel emotional in ways they haven't felt before, and think in ways they haven't thought before. It's exceptional for the movie business.'' In fact, the success of atypical summer fare like Truman, Ryan, and Mary may have put a dent in independent films as traditional summer counterprogramming. The season's highest-grossing new indie, at $5.7 million, was The Opposite of Sex, and even that got outgunned by the rerelease of Gone With the Wind.
