26
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
ENTERTAINMENT
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 2004
Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) faces-off against Dr. Otto Octavious (Alfred Molina) in Spider-Man 2. The movie is one example of a recent trend in Wednesday movie openings.
Courtesy of Columbia Pictures
Summer sees more Wednesday releases
By Deborah Hornblow The Hartford Courant via KRT Media Services
With this week's opening of Jackie Chan's version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, the film's distributor, Buena Vista Pictures, continues a practice that is becoming routine: the Wednesday film launch.
Where films once traditionally opened on Fridays, and most still do, summer vacations, holiday breaks and Hollywood marketing games have conspired to make the Wednesday movie arrival a regular and largely seasonal occurrence.
Among the titles set to open on a Wednesday this summer are Around the World in 80 Days, White Chicks on June 23, Spider-Man 2 on June 30, King Arthur on July 7, and The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement on Aug.11.
Earlier this year, expectant audiences saw Wednesday openings for films including Shrek 2 and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.
Among the Wednesday openers in the past: each of the films in The Lord of the Rings cycle, the Matrix films, Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace, Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, Armageddon, Independence Day, Men in Black and Mission: Impossible.
Jim Tharp, head of distribution at DreamWorks, which released Shrek 2 on Wednesday, May 19, told www.box-officemojo.com he wanted to get Shrek
2, a well-known movie, out before Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which opened 15 days later on Friday. June 4.)
If a Wednesday launch goes well, a film gets a jump-start on an opening weekend and develops momentum that can crest into big numbers come Saturday and Sunday.
In an industry addicted to bottom lines and opening-weekend grosses, studios pay scrupulous attention to a movie's box-office performance as a means of gauging a film's earning potential and box-office longevity.
This spring, Shrek 2 smashed the midweek box-office record for animated features when it opened May 19 and took in $11.8 million, $1.5 million more than the previous record holder, Pokemon the Movie.
But opening a film on a Wednesday is not without risks.
Take 1998's Godzilla, directed by Roland Emmerich. Godzilla, a $120 million film, stomped into theaters Wednesday, May 20, and laid a big green lizard egg with critics and audiences alike. If the film managed to earn almost $75 million in its first six days, the numbers sagged below expectations.
So Wednesdays are not always the charm.
They are simply another tactic in the always unpredictable game of film distribution, which still depends, more than most bean counters would like to admit, on the quality of the films being released.