We're talking about the movie world here, where summer starts in April, winter starts at Thanksgiving and spring and fall don't really exist.

        Year-end — roughly mid-November to New Year's Eve — is when major studios unleash movies that might win Oscars, or at least Golden Globes.

        But summer is when they make money.

        This summer, more than ever, money is all they made. Rare indeed is a season so overburdened with flash-in-the-pan sensation and so short on originality and surprise.

        Summer is always the season for Big Events! and Amazing Spectacles! International Sensations! It's the season for the flashiest special effects, wildest action and most outrageous comedy. It is the time of year when the most avid, mostly young, movie-goers have time and money to fritter away at the multiplex.

        Financially, this has been a rewarding year for Hollywood, as industry-wide revenues rose along with ticket prices.
       

Drop-off effect

        The talk of the industry this year is the drop-off effect; several movies raked in huge dollars when they opened, then quickly fell off the map. Pearl Harbor, for example, took in almost $90 million during its Memorial Day weekend opening. But in its second weekend, the take dropped to $30 million.

        Part of the reason for the big fall-off is that it is common for big movies to open in more than 3,000 theaters, often on two or three screens in each locale. That's usually enough capacity to satisfy the entire population of gotta-see-it fans in one fell swoop.

        But there is more to it, and it's a reason the studio types are not eager to acknowledge.

        The movies haven't been very good.

        The first weekend draws people intrigued by hype and promise. The next weekend needs word-of-mouth. And there have been precious few movies this summer good enough to send people home eager to tell their friends, “You've got to go see this movie.”
       

Can't live up to hype

        That's what happened with The Sixth Sense, which opened to modest business early in August 1999, and went on to collect almost $300 million in North America. International business more than doubled its total.

        That film earned its audience with a terrific story well told; it was not whipped into the top 10 all-time box office champs by TV ads and MTV specials.

        Perhaps major studios, all controlled by giant international corporations, consider it a safe strategy to drag in massive opening-weekend audiences to see second-rate films. But the more those ticket-buyers go away unsatisfied, the greater the risk they will cease to patronize theaters at all. Disillusionment is a powerful antidote to hype.

        Just look at Pearl Harbor, a movie that was flogged as hard as any movie ever made. Though touted as a slam-dunk to make $300 million, it only recently squeaked past the $200 million mark in North American box-office receipts.

        Ditto Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which opened — on the strength of Angelina Jolie's charms and aggressive marketing — to $47 million in business. A week later, it fell to $14 million, and went downhill from there.

        A similar pattern applied to Jurassic Park III, Scary Movie 2, The Score and Planet of the Apes, among others. What they had in common was a shared failure to live up to expectations. The same can be said of such high-profile box-office underachievers as America's Sweethearts, A Knight's Tale and Angel Eyes.
       

Need word-of-mouth

        Contrast those movies with the ones that turned out better than expected — Shrek, The Princess Diaries, The Fast and the Furious. Those are movies that surprised, entertained and thrilled well enough to inspire fans to recommend them to their friends and family.

        Interestingly, the champion of the word-of-mouth phenomenon this year is the low-budget independent film Memento.

        Technically, this grippingly original, finely crafted thriller was a spring release and it never ran on more than a few screens in Cincinnati; but it ran for months almost entirely on the strength of personal recommendations, returning more than $20 million on its $5 million cost. Pound-for-pound, it was the summer's biggest success.

        Easy as it is for the studios to sell snake oil then beat it out of town, it's also poison that could leave loyal customers with no appetite for the product at all.

        Contact Margaret A. McGurk by phone: 768-8517; fax: 768-8330; e-mail mmcgurk@enquirer.com.
       

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