Will my prophecies PLEASE stop coming true

Box office’s post-summer stum­ble @ Variety

All sum­mer long I rat­tled on about how glo­ri­ous of a time it was for movies. “There will never be another Summer 2007″ I would say to every­one I met. “Soak it up while you can.” And we did; and it was wonderful.

For those who were asleep all sum­mer long, you missed the high­est gross­ing sum­mer in Hollywood’s his­tory. Not only did the num­bers reach record heights on grosses, but even tra­di­tion­ally slow days, like July 4th, saw peo­ple head­ing into the mul­ti­plexes in droves. Paramount cracked a bil­lion dol­lars in rev­enue for FY 2007 not even halfway through the year. This sum­mer, Hollywood ran like the well-oiled machine it gained noto­ri­ety for being oh so long ago.

Many things fac­tor into the won­der that was ’07. First and fore­most was the built in mar­ketabil­ity of block­buster sequels (Spiderman 3, Shrek the Third, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Rush Hour 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, The Bourne Ultimatum, Ocean’s Thirteen, Live Free or Die Hard, among oth­ers!). There were also some break­out hits, like “Ratatouille” and “Transformers”. Also, stu­dios worked against each other so well that they actu­ally worked in each other’s favors. There was enough com­pe­ti­tion on the scene to make sched­ul­ing open­ings inter­est­ing, and they all really put the puz­zle together nicely to find the right audi­ences for each movie in turn.

But the sum­mer did have to end even­tu­ally. What’s so sur­pris­ing is that this care­fully planned sum­mer sea­son was fol­lowed by a sea­son full of basi­cally noth­ing. Fall is a very odd time, admit­tedly. Awards sea­son doesn’t get hot until November, but it has become tra­di­tion to slowly leak out the pics you want to push through the win­ter to get an Oscar nod. Either that or you release it a day under the dead­line with much fan­fare, a la Spielberg’s BP nommed “Munich”. The films that have slowly trick­led out of Hollywood, how­ever, have not been per­form­ing, really at all. Business is bad.

The most suc­cess­ful film since the sum­mer has been “The Gameplan”, star­ring The Rock, a film whose trailer elicited groans of annoy­ance from every sin­gle the­ater audi­ence I’ve been in. But it won out, prob­a­bly for not being depress­ing as all hell, which is this season’s run­ning theme.

Why is this bad news?

Because Summer 2008 already looks like a bum­mer from this angle. As the WGA strike looms (It could start as early as this com­ing Thursday), and the prob­a­bil­ity of a DGA strike next sum­mer stays in the back of our minds, it’s hard to fig­ure out where the good work is going to come from. Studios are rapidly green­light­ing projects to still have prod­uct should a picket line be setup. While next sum­mer may not be devoid of huge grosses, one thing it will lack is a slew of sequels. In fact, the biggest chal­lenge next year is going to be build­ing new auds around new prod­ucts, which is a very scary thing to do.

I know this can be too much biz talk for some of you (if any­one actu­ally reads this), but it’s impor­tant. The movie busi­ness is bloated, bust­ing at the seams. It has never cost this much to pay actors, there have never been as much cash paid out for fringe ben­e­fits, the price of pop­corn has never been this high, and the com­pe­ti­tion for audi­ences atten­tion has never been so crowded. Ever, in his­tory. I com­mend the stel­lar sea­son the execs gave us this past sum­mer. It was a much needed down­pour after a drought which allows the stu­dios to focus on other good work, includ­ing the small pics that we all love and wish to make ourselves.

However, the returns are behind right now. And if prof­its dip through the rest of the year, then the stu­dio heads bosses may come knock­ing, and that’s the worst thing in the world for us inde­pen­dent folk.

Or is it?