Biggest Summer

By Joel Stein

Before the weekend of May 3, we were a splintered nation. Some of us were seeing Changing Lanes, some Ice Age, others The Rookie. Someone even walked into Life or Something Like It. We were lost, lonely demographics, having our own little experiences all by ourselves. And then along came your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. In that one weekend, about 20 million Americans saw Spider-Man, making Sony $115 million--by far the most any film has ever made in a weekend (and a nonholiday one at that). By this coming weekend, Spider-Man, which cost about $120 million to make and $50 million to market, was expected to have earned $225 million. But by breaking the four-minute mile of Hollywood--the $100 million opening weekend--Spidey has shrewdly fine-tuned the rules about moviemaking, marketing and distribution. It also marks the beginning of what is sure to be the biggest moviegoing summer ever.

We yearn for mass events, and no one has figured out how to create them better than the movies. The movie business, more than ever, is the blockbuster business--the big money is in getting everyone to see your movie in its first week and then feeding them sequels and T shirts and theme-park rides and bonus-packed DVDs as reminiscence. Because there are a limited number of blockbusters a year, they are the only form of entertainment that still seems special.

Whereas movies and music once built an audience slowly, entertainment is now disposable, designed to gather a heterogeneous society together for one week and then fade away. We have become a first-week culture.

When the networks gave way to the splintervision of cable and rock subgenred itself out of the business of unifying youth, we lost our national conversation. Since then, we have been trying to rebuild an Ed Sullivan from spare parts. Television, having mostly traded in mass storytelling for niche storytelling, has supplemented its limited diet of universally appealing programs like the Oscars and the Super Bowl by creating semireal events like The Bachelor and Survivor. Albums are one-week events: platinum albums are no longer achieved after two hit singles snake their way up Casey Kasem's chart but rather in the very first weeks, through promotion, before beginning their swift, inevitable drop. But no one has figured out how to create a blockbuster that generates a national conversation better than Spider-Man.

Sony had a simple marketing campaign, with those billboards featuring a masked red-and-blue character and the release date (perhaps inspired by Warner Bros.' immensely successful tease for the Batman franchise in 1989). But the real genius was knowing what people cared about: the Date. It was also having a product that did not need marketing. "We knew that people know what Spider-Man is. We didn't want to come in with bombastic catchphrases," says Avi Arad, president of Marvel Studios. If a star saves 30 minutes of character exposition, a superhero probably saves a full hour. The name Spider-Man gets you 10 minutes more. Not even Rob Schneider movies (The Animal and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo) have titles this self-explanatory.

But the main reason Spider-Man became the conversation of our country is that people liked it and told their friends so right away. On Friday night, out of people polled who had seen the movie, 95% said they would recommend it to a friend; 70% said they would pay to see it again. (You usually have to bomb Baghdad to get that kind of approval ratings.) People have always liked Spider-Man: compared with the ultrasquare alien Superman and the brooding millionaire Batman, Spidey's an accidental superhero, a geeky and self-doubting teen, a comic-book character who seems a lot like a comic-book reader. Forty years after Spider-Man's birth, Marvel is still selling four different monthly Spider-Man titles that together add up to about 500,000 copies. "Everybody identifies with him," says Amy Pascal, chairwoman of Sony's Columbia Pictures. "Lucky for us."

Plus, demand was as pent up as Peter Parker's web fluid, thanks to a tangled situation that tied up the movie in legal wrangling among various large (MGM, Sony and Viacom) and small entities (B-movie house the Cannon Group) that each laid claim to tiny parts of Spidey. "Spider-Man was plagued by bad deals, litigation and ownership that obviously wasn't capable of pulling off a movie of this magnitude. Thank God, because if they had done a Spider-Man movie in the mid-'80s, it would have been Cheesy-Man," says Arad.

Yes, Sony was clever to wrangle a can't-miss property in Spider-Man, but the movie is teaching the rest of Hollywood some important rules about creating a modern blockbuster.

RULE 1: Make It Half Action, Half Romance

Like Titanic, Spider-Man carefully splits its time between these two themes, allowing it to evenly nail what Hollywood these days calls all four demographic quadrants: male, female, under 25 and 25 and over. (The breakdown for the opening Saturday night was 54% male, 46% female, 52% 25 and over, 48% under.) Kids may be the heart of summer-movie sales, but adults pay full price and fill up the seats in late-night showings. Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones is trying to do this too, but women aren't buying it; a tracking survey from last week showed men were much more interested in seeing the movie than women.

RULE 2: Start Early

Ever since Twister grossed $41 million the weekend of May 10, 1996, the summer has inched back into May. Spider-Man has probably cemented this. "It does allow an advantage in getting theater shelf space because you're ahead of the pack," says Jeff Blake, the head of Sony marketing and distribution. By going early, Spider-Man got in 7,500 screens out of about 35,000 for its big weekend.

RULE 3: Save Your Stars

When you've got a franchise like Spider-Man, you'd be a fool to pay an actor $20 million; Tobey Maguire got $4 million. Studios will work even harder to find scripts like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Incredible Hulk in which the idea itself is the marquee. One irony of all this is that it makes movies more like television. Says Walter Parkes, the co-head of DreamWorks' film division: "The network-television business is really about three things: demographics, scheduling and series. We're becoming a little bit like that."

RULE 4: Don't Worry Too Much About the Writing

Complicated exposition falls away with costumes, special effects, good-looking actors and a protagonist who can shoot a white, gooey liquid 100 feet into the air from his wrists. When the genre is the star, the script doesn't have to be.

RULE 5: Get Kirsten Dunst Wet

Not every movie can have a scene in which Dunst's pink shirt gets soaked in the rain before she makes out with a guy in spandex headgear, but many will try to work it into the plot somehow.

The final lesson is that tracking opening weekends has become a national pastime. Regular people don't track what Windows 2000 pulled in on its first day of sales or how many Toyota Camrys were driven off the lot that first week. But movies, as our proudest and most exciting cultural export, are monitored by Americans the way they used to watch the NASDAQ. There's a kind of pride that we can blow $115 million in one weekend on a comic-book movie; Spider-Man was our May Day. And if $115 million of fun was going on in one weekend, people want to be at the party.

Nowadays if you see an event movie after the first couple of weeks, you're not really a participant but an observer, a sociologist trying to discover what it was that everyone was so excited about. If you want to be part of the cultural conversation--and we live in a society in which you are more likely to be embarrassed for not knowing who Kirsten Dunst is than for not being able to name your Senators--you can't wait around until there are no more lines at the multiplex.

Tom Borys, the president of AC Nielsen EDI, predicts a $9 billion year for movies, up more than 10% from last year's record. As always, summer, teeming with bored teens willing to see films more than once, is blockbuster season, and this summer is almost certain to be the biggest one ever, thanks in large part to Spider-Man and Star Wars, which opens this week. At evenly spaced intervals throughout the summer, we'll line up for a handful of blockbusters. And unless you live in a city, they are pretty much the only ones you'll be able to see until the leaves turn in the fall. This week, instead of Star Wars bouncing Spider-Man from theaters, the mall eightplex is likely to give you five Star Wars and three Spider-Mans. Artisan Entertainment CEO Amir Malin is concerned. "Some good word-of-mouth films may be squeezed out by some of these blockbuster films. It could be a very good film, but it may not have the dry powder available to open up with a huge performance."

Nor should it. Why should you pay $10 to have a meditative, contemplative experience with strangers when you have a DVD player with surround sound at home? Films are held at coliseums like the new giant theaters with stadium seating built for laughing, crying and screaming at grand heroics. Sophocles wrote about killing your kids and having sex with your mom and gods descending at the last second to save the day. He knew how to pull off a decent opening weekend. --Reported by Jess Cagle/Los Angeles and Benjamin Nugent and Heather Won Tesoriero/New York

With reporting by Jess Cagle/Los Angeles and Benjamin Nugent and Heather Won Tesoriero/New York