There is a widespread feeling that summer 2001 has been a particularly rotten one for new releases, even by the grim standards of the late 1990s. What may go down in history as the Summer of Sequels (Rush Hour, American Pie, Jurassic Park, Dr Dolittle) or the Summer of Computer- Generated Actors (Final Fantasy) is equally likely to be remembered for its extreme shortage of critical successes.
If I rack my brains for one hit movie that got great reviews, I can only come up with Shrek, and somehow that doesn't feel like very much. Elsewhere, it has been Pearl Harbor this (a flop compared to the massive expectations it raised), Evolution that ("the next Ghostbusters", my ass), Final Fantasy the other - a series of aesthetically horrible disappointments, with only occasional upsets like The Fast and The Furious to spice up the mix.
And still they come: The Score, American Sweethearts, Planet of the Apes, even the fondly awaited American Pie 2: all horribly predictable, artistically offensive, insultingly lowly in their ambitions. The only surprise is that there are no surprises whatsoever.
Or only one. The shocker is that, despite all this, 2001 may end up breaking the $2.7 billion box-office records set during the (apparently halcyon) summer of 1999. But anyone who has kept an eye on the box-office charts this summer is aware that every weekend there has been one clear leader among the new releases, and that it, too, will be toppled by another movie that lacks the staying power to last more than a week at number one. Every big release will top out in week one, then see its second week's takings plummet by between 50 and 80 per cent.
Averaging things out, this has happened to every blockbuster this year, going right back to Memorial Day and The Mummy Returns, which sold $68.1 million worth of tickets in its first three days, followed by less than half that in its second week. Likewise Jurassic Park III, which dropped off by 56 per cent, and Planet of the Apes, which fell by 60 per cent. All these second-week cash-haemorrhages are of an order of business that industry-watchers generally refer to as "staggering".
Apparently, according to Warner Bros' distribution chief Dan Fellman, "people have got to see the movie the first weekend they can. After that, the frenzy is over". All except the frenzy of money-counting that studio accountants indulge in every Monday morning, because initial figures are individually pretty staggering themselves, enough for the first weekends to account for 60-70 per cent of the movies' entire takings.
One of the reasons is a new studio marketing tactic known as "front-loading", in which it's expected that a movie will make unprecedented proportions of its revenue in week one, followed by rancid receipts thereafter. Ten years ago, a drop-off of 35 per cent was considered catastrophic: now it's all part of the plan - or at least, it's acceptable collateral damage.
Compressing that much of the potential box-office into one weekend means more money for the studios because of the deeply inequitable deals between them and cinema operators in the early weeks of a new release, when the studios will pocket up to 80 per cent of the takings. The older a movie is (say, the ripe old age of three and a half weeks), the smaller the percentage pocketed by the Tinseltown nobs. After that, why should they bust their chops for less moolah?
The one factor that now seems irrelevant are the movies themselves. And this is part of the genius of this particular system. The studios must surely realise that any movie that bottoms out so spectacularly in its second weekend is a movie that's been decisively "found out" by moviegoers.
The last thing this strategy requires is that the movie be any good. Why? Because who cares about the merits of the product if all the available artistic ingenuity has been expended on the marketing campaign? It has been evident this summer that the studios are all too aware of the general shoddiness of what they have on offer. Why else would they have gone so far as to invent an entirely fictional critic to pimp their threadbare wares, or to dragoon their own marketing department staffers into masquerading as satisfied movie-goers in staged TV-promo adverts? Movie-poster blurbs are now a national joke, generally considered to have been extracted from pliable critics through coercion, bribery, blackmail or blowjobs. One thing is as clear as daylight: the studios think we're all idiots - closer to livestock than to people, needing to be herded from one dreadful movie to the next before we wake and feel the sting of the cattle-prod.
But no, the audience isn't stupid. The very concept of front-loading is predicated on the notion that audiences will detect the smell of Hollywood horseshit on the breeze within seven days flat and thereafter will withdraw their financial support in no uncertain terms.
That's what I call intelligence, and why can't the studios appeal to that intelligence?