LA Times (6/26/08): “Studios Go to Summer School”

Mid-summer analysis of seasonal box office. The talking points:

* Even in the summer, originality counts more than anything.

* Size matters.

* Event movies come in all shapes and sizes.

* Complete concept rejection is always a killer.

* Fox can sell snow to Eskimos, but not all the time.

* Darkness should be limited to theater lighting, not tone.

* Paramount is on fire.

The “complete concept rejection” is the one that strikes home most for screenwriters because, after all, we traffic in story concepts all the time. From the article:

It’s the same idea of pushing a plate of smoked tofu in front of your 3-year-old: not a single bite. Already this summer, the studios have spent fortunes on two movies that audiences rejected within minutes of their landing at the multiplex. Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow invested at least $150 million in “Speed Racer,” while Paramount and Spyglass split the bill on the $70-million “The Love Guru,” with multiple millions more spent on marketing both releases. Despite the wall-to-wall marketing blitzes, neither film will gross $45 million domestically in theaters.

I’m sure the execs who greenlit these two projects thought they were safe decisions: one a beloved animation series, should grab both kids and their parents who remember the show from yesteryear, the other the first live-action movie from Mike Myers in five years. But both of those rationales fail to consider the underlying story concepts, neither of which seems particularly strong — and evidently, moviegoers, or in this case movie-not-goers, concur.