THE ARTS:WHEN THE director Michael Bay paraded Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox in front of hordes of screaming fans at the world premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallenearlier this month in Tokyo, the photo opportunity marked the start of a summer event that had been nearly two years in the making – which was when the previous Transformers movie was released, writes JEREMY KAY
Franchises are the name of the game in Hollywood these days. Cast your eye down the list of forthcoming summer releases and you'll see a super-sized popcorn bucket of familiar properties coming your way, from current releases such as Terminator Salvation, Angels & Demonsand Night at the Museum 2to the imminent launches of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaursand, later this year, The Twilight Saga: New Moon.
That Hollywood regards franchises as the gift that keeps on giving isn’t exactly news, but what is unprecedented is the sheer volume of franchises in the pipeline. Tinseltown’s appetite for proven formulas makes sound business sense, especially with the recession making the money men more risk averse.
And when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, it's little wonder there's such a stampede to movies that have proved their success. Within weeks of the July 4th opening weekend of the first Transformersfilm in 2007, some time before the final $708 million global gross was reached, the top brass of Paramount and DreamWorks had gathered to plot the next instalment. By September of that year they announced that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallenwould launch on the weekend of June 26th 2009. The script for the follow up was barely a glint in the studio executives' eyes at that point, but they knew they needed to secure a favourable date in the crowded calendar of releases and work backwards from there.
As a general rule, two-thirds of a blockbuster’s worldwide box-office is taken outside North America these days, an inescapable truism that has forced US executives to consider the rest of the world when they schedule movies.
“We are now looking at tentatively dating movies around the world two-plus years out, so that everything else you do on the project can be channelled towards that date,” says Andrew Cripps, the president of Paramount Pictures International, who is charged with orchestrating the studio’s release strategy outside North America.
“You start your campaign as soon as the studio puts films up for green light,” says Cripps. “I sit around with the studio heads and the heads of production, North American distribution and marketing, and discuss the way ahead.”
In this case, the consensus was to adhere as closely as possible to the model for the first film. Indeed Paramount has already tentatively set the third Transformersepisode – due in 2011 – to open over the independence day weekend. "This is one of the most lucrative weekends in the calendar," says Cripps. "The idea is the movie opens strongly and heads into the holiday period in the US for a great second weekend. Internationally it coincides with when a lot of children get out for the school holidays."
To see how important this short window of box-office opportunity is to the franchise-makers, look at the release schedules for the few weeks from late June. The week after Paramount releases the Transformersmovie, 20th Century Fox follows with the family-friendly Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, with the studios hoping to make plenty of money before Warner Bros releases Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Princearound most of the world in mid-July. Of course, it takes more than integrated distribution and marketing campaigns – not to mention the intricate promotional tie-ins – to make a successful franchise.
On the creative side, franchises thrive on thematic continuity. "You need to have characters that audiences want to spend more time with, and you need a big idea," says Shawn Levy, director and producer of Fox's Night at the Museum. "For example, the idea of Harry Potter is he's a young wizard at a school for the paranormal, whereas Night at the Museumis about a magical tablet that brings museum contents to life after dark."
It helps to step up the scale from film to film, too. Just as the warring robots in Revenge of the Fallenupgrade from city streets to the Pyramids of Giza for their climactic battle, so Ben Stiller's hapless security guard abandons the corridors of New York's Museum of Natural History for the labyrinthine halls of Washington DC's Smithsonian complex in the sequel.
About one month after Levy's 2006 original was on its way towards its $574.5 million worldwide haul, Fox called him in to discuss a follow-up. "I saw the opening credit sequence of Night at the Museum2 vividly in my head within a week of the first film going out," Levy says. Clearly his vision had wide appeal, because within barely three weeks of release, Night at the Museum2 had amassed more than $226 million worldwide.
Levy counsels restraint in the early stages of franchise building. “You can’t try to launch a franchise right away; that’s a dicey mindset. You try to make one very good movie that people will respond to and build on that. And there’s no franchise without the main actor or actors, and the main actor doesn’t tend to show up unless there’s a key relationship with the film-makers.
“It was important for Ben to show up with me. The studio often has an appetite for a franchise and it requires a film-making team to do creative work to bring the talent.”
A-list stars such as Stiller are paid handsomely for their efforts on franchises, but at a time when cost-conscious studios are fighting the agencies tooth-and-nail on compensation packages it is the visionary directors such as Levy and Bay, who often write and/or produce as well, who stand to gain the most.
"These days unless you are Tom Cruise or Will Smith, more and more event films tend to be sold off a director or a great conceit, preferably based on a property with built-in source material," says Scott Agostoni, a leading Hollywood agent with William Morris Endeavor. "The deals for Transformers 2,for example, would have been built on the fact that you have a pre-existing brand. In these risk-averse times the studios are most interested in properties based on a comic book, novel or video game. It doesn't have to have a rabid following like Twilight. Wantedwasn't based on a huge comic-book and it became a big hit." Wantedgrossed $341 million worldwide.
WITH LITERALLY THOUSANDS OFpromising stories swirling around in the ether, the trick is to find the ones that lend themselves to visual adaptation. Harry Potteris arguably the jewel in the crown of franchise movie-making, and as the sixth instalment approaches, with the two-part finale scheduled for November 2010 and July 2011, it remains on course to become the biggest global franchise in history.
The success of the Potter series illustrates the opportunities the best properties provide, but you can have a fantastic property and still not be able to develop the franchise you want – only to see it become a hit for someone else.
In late 2006, when Paramount's MTV Films division gave up trying to crack the script to Twilight, based on the first of Stephenie Meyer's bestselling vampire romance novels, production executive Karen Rosenfelt instead placed it with Erik Feig, the head of production at a fledgling studio called Summit Entertainment.
Feig and Rosenfelt were so passionate about the project that Summit was able to persuade Meyer to sign a rights deal for the novel just as the company came into money from finalising its initial round of corporate financing.
It proved to be one of the great coups of modern Hollywood history. Summit assigned Melissa Rosenberg to write the screenplays, hired Catherine Hardwicke to direct and enlisted two perfect leads: the UK actor Robert Pattinson, whose most prominent role to date had been noble Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Kristen Stewart.
"Initially we wanted to do Twilightbecause of the story," says Summit co-chairman and chief executive Rob Friedman, coincidentally a former vice-chairman at Paramount. "That's where it all starts. We felt it was captivating and totally unique for a very defined audience – essentially Romeo and Julietin a vampire world. As we got into the property and started to think about the movie we felt there was a franchise opportunity here."
Friedman, Feig and Co took great care to reassure fans of the books that their beloved Bella Swan and her vampire love Edward Cullen were in safe hands. “The fans were critical,” Frideman says. “We monitored Stephenie’s fan site and their responses. We were sensitive to what we believed they would like. We worked closely with Stephenie since the first day and when we had stuff to show we would break it to the fans first. Quite often what happens with adaptations is people try to make the film different and key elements get changed. Our process was very clear – the love story doesn’t resolve itself until the end of the fourth book and we were determined to honour that.”
Summit released a teaser trailer in May 2008 and in July of that year it staged arguably the US pop culture event of the year by taking Hardwicke and the cast to the Comic-Con convention in San Diego. The rest is history.
Last November Twilightscored a thunderous $69.6 million opening weekend in the US, en route to a staggering $380 million worldwide haul. Within days the company had announced it was moving ahead on the sequel.
Chris Weitz was brought in to direct the returning cast after Hardwicke and Summit parted ways following amicable creative differences, and the movie will open around most of the world on November 19th and 20th. To keep anticipation levels high, Summit premiered a new trailer on MySpace last week, drawing a record 10 million-plus hits, and will return to Comic-Con in July with the cast.
"Your advertising campaign does one job, but captivating audiences by bringing the stars to them takes you much further," says Cripps. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'skey cast and crew are currently on a multi-country tour in the run-up to the film's release. One gets the sense it will be worth it.
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