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First of all, the old record for opening-weekend money was all of six months old, held by Harry Potter. And the Spider-Man record might be bested in the months to come, either by the new Star Wars movie later this month or by Men in Black 2 in July. Spider-Man's $110-million-plus weekend is indeed a triumph — a technical marketing triumph. It was literally impossible until recently for a movie to make anywhere near the amount of money Spider-Man has made. But now studios are willing to place huge bets by striking thousands of prints to satisfy the demand they ratchet up with their multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns. Think about it. A single print of a movie may cost as much as $10,000 to produce. Sony Pictures made something like 3,000 prints of Spider-Man. That's a $30 million investment right there. (Before 1975, a studio made a huge commitment to a movie by striking 1,000 prints. Now every major studio release has a minimum of 1,500 prints in circulation.) And those 3,000 prints get a serious workout. Innovations in movie-theater design have made it possible to show the same print of a single movie on two or three screens at once. How? Theater owners literally rotate the projectors. The projection booths in new multiplexes have been built in such a way that the same print of a movie can be shown simultaneously on several screens. While Reel #2 of Spider-Man starts to unspool in Cinema 1 at your multiplex, the projector that just finished showing Reel #1 rotates on a turntable and begins playing in Cinema 2. All the marketing and sales lessons learned by the movie studios over the past 30 years have coalesced to create the opening weekend of Spider-Man. Lesson 1: It's easier to peddle something that's already famous. Spider-Man was, as they say in Hollywood, "pre-sold." The studio didn't have to do much to ensure name recognition because Spider-Man is well-known to many generations of boys who read the comic book or saw any number of television versions of the character (there were at least three cartoon versions and one live-action show on CBS). Lesson 2: Exploit the marketplace. The reason for the huge number of prints is that audiences are fickle. If they don't go see the movie in the first couple of weeks, they won't go at all. So make it as easy as possible for them to go. Lesson 3: Get the girls. If you combine a teen-adventure story with a romance and then sell the romance, you can make sure that both boys and their girlfriends will want to see it. That's what made Titanic so spectacularly popular. (George Lucas is trying the same thing with the new Star Wars movie, which has a love story at its center.) Lesson 4: Get the kids. If you keep it clean, parents won't mind bringing their pre-teen children. The movie is rated PG-13, but there's almost no reason it couldn't be rated G (except that some things blow up and there are some fist fights). There's no foul language, no smuttiness. And it's not terribly intense. The villain isn't a Gothic horror show, like Jack Nicholson's Joker in Batman; he's a cackling guy in a green hockey mask who rides on a flying skateboard. Not very scary. Lesson 5: Heroism sells. There's not a moment's ambiguity in Spider-Man. Peter Parker, the boy who becomes a crusader, is never tempted by the dark side even though the green guy in the hockey mask tries to tempt him. Peter Parker doesn't have a dark side, even though he's half-spider. He's a good kid who tries to do good for his family and his city, and the audience roots for him because, well, why shouldn't it? This is why the comic-book movies Spider-Man and Batman both were huge at the box office and video-game movies like Final Fantasy were disasters. Audiences need character s they can identify with. In the movies adapted from video games, the characters aren't even one-dimensional, much less two-dimensional. As a movie, Spider-Man is perfectly okay. As an object to be studied by students in business school who want to know how to corner the marketplace, it's a work of genius.
— Mr.
Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post. |
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pider-Man
made more money in its opening weekend than any other movie ever. Don't
let the spin doctors at the studios fool you into thinking it's a cultural
phenomenon on the order of Titanic or Gone with the Wind.
