What Studios Should’ve Learned From 1998

In Hollywood, hindsight is always in far greater supply than foresight. With that in mind, we offer 10 Box-Office Lessons From ‘98--pay attention, studio chiefs, there will be a test later.

1. Old shoes in a new box do not new shoes make.

Despite enticing marketing campaigns and hip, smirky ad lines like “Size Matters,” movies such as “Godzilla,” “The Avengers” and “Psycho” were correctly perceived as the tired retreads they were.

2. A little seltzer down your pants.

Studio executives should be forced to watch “Sullivan’s Travels” at least once a year. Audiences were literally starved for comedy, so much so that they went to see the relative few that were released over and over again: “Dr. Dolittle,” “There’s Something About Mary,” “Rush Hour” and “The Waterboy,” each of which became a huge hit, whether they were funny or not.

3. No one’s afraid of Roger Rabbit--or even a mouse named Mickey.

Animation moved beyond Disney in a big way this year. There have been the isolated non-Disney animated hits before like Warner Bros.’ “Space Jam” and Paramount’s “Beavis and Butt-head Do America.” But 1998 was the first year they arrived in multiples and most (except Warner’s terrible “Quest for Camelot”) managed to rack up impressive grosses. Non-Disney toons such as “The Rugrats Movie” (Paramount) and “Antz” (DreamWorks) did well; the jury is still out on the year-end spectacle “The Prince of Egypt,” also from DreamWorks. And the competition was good for Disney too. “Mulan” was the studio’s best summer performer in several years and “A Bug’s Life” looks to be almost as big as its computer-animated “Toy Story.”

4. Stix Pick Chick Flicks.

While the studios were marveling at how important the under-21 crowd is at the movies (duh?), a few smart executives were paying attention to the underserved female half of the population. The term “chick flick” finally attained respectability, thanks to such female-skewed hits as “City of Angels,” “Hope Floats,” “Ever After,” “The Wedding Singer,” “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” and the current “Stepmom.” And even in cases where it was virtually impossible to drag men into the theaters along with them (“Stepmom,” “Hope Floats”) even as dates, women went anyway.

5. An Rx for disaster.

The problem with “Beloved” wasn’t that it was a period piece or a women’s picture but that it was sold like cough medicine. Ignoring the fact that the history lesson approach sank “Amistad,” last year Disney went ahead with a similar “It’s good for you” campaign on “Beloved.” This is the movies after all, not school.

6. It doesn’t matter if they’re on the cover of Vanity Fair.

The year’s breakout stars like Adam Sandler, Chris Tucker and Cameron Diaz were created by audiences not by the hype machine. No matter how many magazine covers they negotiated for their clients, the high-profile publicity overdrive on films like “Bulworth,” “Beloved,” “Meet Joe Black” and “Primary Colors” provoked little box-office interest outside of the self-important media capitals of New York and Los Angeles.

7. Not every film is “The Waterboy.”

The box-office failure of certain well-reviewed non-popcorn movies like “The Butcher Boy” (Warner Bros.), “Without Limits” (Warner Bros.) and “One True Thing” (Universal) speaks to a need for studios to emulate specialty companies like Miramax, Gramercy, New Line and Fox Searchlight, which have created box-office gold out of singular nuggets like “The Piano,” “Fargo” and “The Full Monty.” Like those independently made movies, these offbeat studio projects needed the kind of careful, grass-roots nurturing the big studio marketing and distribution organisms no longer provide.

8. The multiplex is not the WB network.

First it was “Airplane!” knockoffs, then “Pulp Fiction” retreads. The latest no-brainer outpouring is hip-scary movies, a phenomenon that began with “Scream” and has engendered a look-alike group of model-pretty youth ensemble pieces that are all beginning to smell alike: “Urban Legend,” “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,” “Disturbing Behavior,” “The Faculty” and “Halloween H20.” The relatively low budgets on most of these movies have been the only factor keeping this assembly line from shutting down.

9. Timing is everything.

No matter how good your movie is, if it’s released at the wrong time, it’s going to have big problems at the box office. Two of the better reviewed films of the year were box-office duds: Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” and George Miller’s “Babe: Pig in the City.” In both cases, the timing of their release was off. The charms of Soderbergh’s funny/sexy movie was lost amid the summer glut. “Babe” had little chance of success against obvious kiddie fare like “A Bug’s Life” and “Rugrats” but got tied into a merchandise-driven release date. Positioning problems also plagued “Bulworth” and “Primary Colors” (which, like “Babe” and “Out of Sight,” was released by Universal). The failure of these politically themed movies was blamed on the subject matter. But the independently made “Wag the Dog,” released last winter, was a financial success.

10. Get a life: No one is nostalgic for the ‘70s.

“The Last Days of Disco” didn’t work, neither did “54” or “Velvet Goldmine.” Adults who lived through the period evidenced no desire to walk down disco-glam memory lane. And kids thought it was just silly.