“Are moviegoers tiring of sequels?”

Per THR:

Hollywood still hopes to shake off early symptoms, but there is spreading concern that the summer boxoffice will be plagued by a nasty case of sequelitis.

Conditions are ripe: Studios have planted 11 sequels or franchise reboots in the fertile May-August span, up from nine last summer and seven from the 2008 season. But those opened so far have underwhelmed, with seasonal boxoffice off by a double-digit margin and studio executives beginning to feel woozy.

Most recently, Warner Bros.’ “Sex and the City 2” was expected to outpace its 2008 predecessor and top the Memorial Day weekend. Instead, it lagged the original’s bow dramatically and debuted with a tarnished bronze medal, trailing even Disney’s disappointing “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.” (A would-be franchise starter, “Persia” will need outsized international contributions to reach profitability.)

DreamWorks Animation’s “Shrek Forever After” finished first in the frame. But that was of limited relief, as the Paramount-distributed four-quel missed consensus forecasts for its opening by a nauseating $30 million.

Reaction to the latest disappointments came swiftly.

“There very well could be some burnout with moviegoers, who are looking for something new and fresh,” a top studio exec lamented Tuesday.

I love these knee-jerk reactions that always land in the press after one or more movies of a type either tanks or kicks ass at the box office, the former driven by fear that a business paradigm may be faltering, the latter an embrace of a new wrinkle in business strategy and a way to create another layer between life as a studio exec and fear.

More on fear in Hollywood here.

Let’s see how the next sequel fares: Toy Story 3. I’ll bet it’s in the “kick ass” category.

Coming tomorrow: Reflections by its screenwriter Michael Arndt on working with Pixar.

Comment Archive