Return of The Grownups

By RICHARD CORLISS

It was a rainy Friday afternoon in the New Jersey resort town of Stone Harbor, so an extended family of eight went to see The Fugitive. During the scary parts, Elizabeth, 85, clutched the hand of her daughter-in-law Mary, 48, who enjoyed the movie's gloss on a favorite old TV show. The cat-and-mouse interplay of hunter and haunted had Trish, 26, scraping the polish off her fingernails. Craig, 12, appreciated the cinematic ingenuity of the mise en scene. And everybody loved the train wreck. The whole family had a good time at the movies. Maybe they'll all do it again real soon.

People of all ages are getting the moviegoing habit this summer. Over Memorial Day weekend, Sylvester Stallone went sky-high with Cliffhanger, but that was just a sneak preview of the sweltering summer box office. In June, Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, which will soon become the second highest- grossing film in history (after Spielberg's E.T.), got everybody into the theaters. Viewers liked what they saw and kept coming back. Sleepless in Seattle enticed the cooing couples. The Firm, In the Line of Fire and Rising Sun proved there was a huge July audience for old-fashioned suspense films. And now The Fugitive, which opened to the largest August weekend business ever, seems sure to fill seats through Labor Day and beyond.

Wait a minute. Except for Jurassic Park, whose PG-13 rating is meant to scare off the very young, these are all what used to be called adult movies. Wasn't this supposed to be the Summer of Boys? Weren't the studios primed for pint-size blockbusters about 12-year-old emotional overachievers? Well, yes -- and the kids are at the movies too. Free Willy (a boy and his whale) has struck a heart chord; this inexpensive tearjerker will earn about $80 million. Rookie of the Year (a boy and his fastball) and Dennis the Menace (a boy and his grandparent surrogate) have won solid numbers, and Searching for Bobby Fischer (a boy and his pawn) may find fanciers. Enough kids are seeing the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to make it Disney's top film of the summer. But given all the toddler fodder Hollywood produced, the Children's Crusade did not show up in force.

Baby-boomer parents were supposed to take their five-year-olds to the movies. In fact, they took their teenagers as well -- probably in separate cars -- to films that cut across generational chasms. "Someone called me yesterday," says Fugitive director Andrew Davis, "whose nine-year-old loved it." Nora Ephron, director of Sleepless in Seattle, surmises that her audience is "grownups -- over 18s, anyway -- and more females than males. But when you get up to where we are, everybody is going to see it." Wolfgang Petersen, whose In the Line of Fire is in the same box-office stratosphere as Sleepless, has similar anecdotal evidence. "At the theaters," he says, "I found not only the 18-to-50-year-olds, but people much older than that." Suddenly, moviegoing is geriatric chic.

"This is a summer for everyone," says A.D. Murphy, The Hollywood Reporter's solon of industry stats. "The mix of films proves it. I project $2.1 billion -- a record summer, beating out the $2.04 billion Batman summer of '89." And if you think inflation takes the bloom off that boom, remember that billions of dollars more are spent renting movies for videoing at home. "In 1980," Murphy notes, "theaters worldwide contributed 80% of the revenue to feature films. In 1992 about 25% of the ultimate revenues came from theaters." Why go out to a theater when you can see a film at home a few months later? Two reasons: moviegoing remains the ultimate "cheap date," and this summer there are a lot of films folks can't wait to see. "If you make good movies," Petersen says, "they will come." The multiplex, not the living room, is this summer's field of dreams.

Philip Kaufman, who directed Rising Sun, has a theory of his own. "We've gone through a period where the older folks have rented tapes and stayed home. Now they're ready to go out. You just can't duplicate moviegoing at home. People want to go to a theater, be in a crowd and see something on the screen larger than life. I think we need these safety valves, these social events, where people have some sort of assured catharsis. Maybe it helps democracy, helps take pressures off society. People want to be with other people." And grownups want to see movies about grownups.

To be sure, most of these adult movies aren't all that adult. Like the newest action entry, John Woo's Hard Target (see box), they are examples of that hoary Hollywood genre, the chase movie. They are about some guy being tracked and caught by some other guy or woman (or velociraptor). The Fugitive is a two-hour chase, In the Line of Fire a two-hour stalk. Sleepless in Seattle could be a stalker movie too, if only the woman pursuing that soulful voice on the radio, and crisscrossing the continent to spy on a seductive stranger, had been a man. All three pictures are two-character stories in which the two characters hardly ever see each other; they do most of their communicating over the phone. The films bring a modern twist -- dissociated life in these not-at-all United States -- to familiar Hollywood plot lines. Man chases satanic shadow. Boy almost never meets girl.

Say this for the summer hits: they are about smart men and women in jeopardy, people who use their wits to get out of tight spots and their heart as compasses to a happy ending. The Fugitive is the prime example, as Davis eagerly points out. "Here's a guy," he says of Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford), "who comes home one evening, and his life falls apart. He has to prove his innocence, and he's on the run. You care about the people. That's the trick. The stunts won't get you there. You can have different textures and flavors in a movie, and it can work. It's like a nice stew. Those different ingredients don't have to be in there, but they make it a richer meal."

The season's box-office banquet was made from scratch -- for this is the Summer of No Sequels. Last year Batman Returns and Lethal Weapon 3 led the summer pack. Among the top five earners in 1991 were Terminator 2 and The Naked Gun 21/2; in 1990 Die Hard 2 and Back to the Future III; in 1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2 and Ghostbusters II. The one big 1993 sequel, Hot Shots! Part Deux, won't finish in the Top 10.

For brand names in 1993, movies used a lure that worked well 50 years ago: popular novels. In the past four summers, only two Top 10 films (Presumed Innocent and Patriot Games) were based on familiar book titles. Michael Crichton alone will match that number this year, with Jurassic Park and Rising Sun, and the film of John Grisham's The Firm will be the season's second biggest hit. "Isn't it encouraging," asks Kaufman, "to know that some people might have read a book?"

And other people, a lot of them, might want to see a star. A star playing it smart. All of Arnold Schwarzenegger's muscles could not save Last Action Hero. Instead, viewers wanted to see Tom Hanks, who did not build his career by - taking off his shirt, and Tom Cruise, who has played lawyers, for Pete's sake, in his last two huge hits (A Few Good Men and The Firm). Audiences also doted on actors old enough to be grandfathers: Ford in The Fugitive, Sean Connery in Rising Sun, Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire.

Director Petersen notes that a few years ago, Line of Fire screenwriter Jeff Maguire did the unthinkable: he wouldn't let the film be made with Tom Cruise in the lead role because it would mean jettisoning the "backstory" about a Secret Service agent old enough to have served President Kennedy. "I think it's wonderful that that didn't happen," Petersen says. "Clint is not a young guy anymore, but he is a good actor, and it works." In a bedroom scene with a young female agent, the Eastwood character drops the implements of his trade -- guns, cuffs, a blackjack -- on the floor, and then, when their tryst is interrupted, grouses that he has to put all that stuff back on. Even dressing is a pain for this winded warrior. Audiences seem to love the jokes about what a tired old man he is. Some viewers can empathize; their joints creak along with Clint's.

And the baby boomers are back too; now they're the baby bloomers. A generation that may never have grown up is not likely to think it will ever grow old -- or to renounce the eternally adolescent pleasure of moviegoing. Andrew Davis, for one, looks forward to entertaining these aging viewers for decades to come. "I was born in 1946," he says. "I'm right in the middle of the demographic bulge. If I can keep doing films that will appeal to my generation, someday I can do films about 80-year-old hippies. And these pictures could be hits, even if the theaters have to be equipped with hearing aids and Braille subtitles." What a sweet ambition: to be the auteur of the baby tombers.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Graphic

CAPTION: 1993 SUMMER MOVIES

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York