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Recent blockbusters give jumpstart on promising summer cinema

By Michael Zilberman
Daily Arts Writer

As unpleasant as it may sound, one has to admit that the contents and even quality of a movie at a multiplex near you are in direct dependence on the weather outside. Hollywood prefers to divide the year into seasons according to its own slightly twisted calendar.

Summer (May to Labor Day) is the undisputed blockbuster season, with ridiculous pile-ups of new releases dumped into the same few weekends in fits of aggressive programming. Fall (Labor Day to Thanksgiving) is the Streep season, if you will. It's a time for quieter dramas that might not even recoup their costs in their opening weekend but will presumably have a shot at the Oscars -- and consequently, the second release and an infinite video-store shelf life. Christmas (which seems to run from Thanksgiving to the end of January) is sort of self-explanatory.

And spring, ladies and gentlemen, is one grandiose dumpster of movie releases. Selling a more or less decent product is simply pointless -- it won't qualify for this year's awards and will definitely be forgotten until the next year's (case in point: if last February's "Murder In The First" were released in, say, November, it's Kevin Bacon who would probably be clutching his Best Supporting Actor Oscar on the "USA Today" front page).

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, and sometimes risky release patterns pay off quite nicely. Sometimes they don't. Take, for example, the marketing strategies behind three of the latest Sylvester Stallone movies. In 1993, "Demolition Man" was just about the only dose of blood-and-guts among the generally gentler fall fare, and was advertised accordingly. The target audience (primarily teenagers), semi-alienated by the film industry, immediately made it a hit.

On the other hand, last year's "Judge Dredd," a shameless "Demolition Man" rewrite by the way, grew enough guts to face off with "Batman Forever" in the testosterone-propelled summer season, and the results were pretty unsightly. In the fall of 1995, Stallone went back to the "Demolition Man" tactics with a twist: In an attempt to thrive simultaneously within and against the fall schedule, "Assassins" was advertised as an "arthouse action" movie. Needless to say, the audiences stayed out in droves, both the typical Stallone crowd and the more sophisticated set.

This spring season, however, it looks like we're in the middle of the greatest cross-seasonal marketing coup ever executed by Hollywood. While last March, the audiences starved for anything even remotely resembling an A-grade movie ate up mediocre stuff like "Outbreak," this month, we've been subjected to a slew of releases that would normally be classified as potential summer blockbusters. It's almost like the studios, in their competition to claim the "first summer hit of 1996," finally stretched the summer to include, say, February.

Gone or almost gone from the general picture are Disney live-action cheapies and Chevy Chase vehicles. Instead, there's "The Birdcage" with its 18-million opening weekend; "From Dusk Till Dawn," which instantly transported TV's George Clooney to the true star status and landed him the part of Batman in the upcoming fourth installment; "Executive Decision," a Kurt Russel career-saving move ... And don't forget what was probably the oddest week in Hollywood history, when two (two!) top-grossing slots were occupied by movies with Hong Kong directors -- John Woo's "Broken Arrow" and Stanley Wong's Jackie Chan starrer "Rumble In The Bronx."

Even the failures of this spring are weirdly noble. Take "Mary Reilly," Julia Roberts' sorry stab at serious acting, and -- very recently -- "Before And After," a Meryl Streep-Liam Neeson drama, for example. The fact that Meryl Streep's name shows up in a March release, alone should be an indication that this years' studio calendar is somewhat mangled.

On the flip side of the coin, the summer of 1996 looks almost bland compared to this week's top-grossers. The biggest studio gambles are "Mission: Impossible" (which might end up being perceived as a variation on "Goldeneye") and Demi Moore's "Striptease" (a variation on "Showgirls"). No "Waterworlds" or "Jurassic Parks" anywhere in sight.

For some reason, though, I'm glad. The current situation seems more natural. Frankly, there is something faintly insulting about the system described in the opening paragraph. If one happens to like or dislike a movie, it's nicer to think that the reaction was triggered by the movie as such -- and not predetermined by the season, date, day of the week or level of humidity.