The Kapow! Zap! factor

`Batman Forever' took $52m on its launch weekend. It needed to. By Peter Guttridge

In a year when film attendance in the UK is the lowest for a decade, film distributors and cinema chains in Britain are breathing a sigh of relief this week at the news from the US that the third Batman film, Batman Forever, shattered all box office records in its opening weekend. The film's spectacular take of $52.7m in its first three days gives hope it will help reverse the decline in attendances over here when it opens in July. Its success will also be a relief to Warner Bros, reputed to have spent well in excess of $100m making the film, which stars Val Kilmer as Batman battling the double trouble of Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones.

The opening weekend of an "event" movie like Batman Forever or other mega-buck blockbusters is a nerve-wracking time for the studios. An auspicious opening needs to be followed up by a profitable second weekend, it's true, but a disastrous opening can rarely be turned around.

John Anderson, Director of Advertising and Publicity with Columbia Tri- Star, says: "We gear virtually all our marketing spend to the opening weekend. Because if you haven't launched the film properly it's very hard to build afterwards. And you lose bargaining power with the cinemas who decide on the fourth day what films are going to which screens by looking at the opening weekend figures."

The conventional way to launch an event movie is to release it in as many cinemas as possible simultaneously. Batman Forever opened on 2,842 screens around America. The most successful launch ever was Jurassic Park, which appeared on a similar number of screens in the US and holds the UK record for an opening weekend - pounds 4.8m from 434 prints.

Opening wide has other advantages. A film can make a lot of money before word gets out that it's not very good. As Julia Short, UK Marketing Manager for Polygram points out: "A company with a turkey may decide to open wide then take the money and run." Big budget films which dropped off after their opening weekend include Francis Coppola's Dracula, which opened strongly in the US with a $40m take for its first three days but took only the same amount again for the rest of its run. This summer Congo, based on the Michael Crichton novel and the first of the season's blockbusters to open here [next week], took $25m in its first US weekend but dropped by over 50% for its second.

"Word of mouth quickly decides the fate of a movie after the opening weekend," says Ralf Ludemann of the industry newspaper Screen International. "But it's unwise to judge how a film is going to do purely on that basis. Usually you see how it has done over the second weekend too."

Batman Forever's second weekend may be blighted by the release of Disney's latest cartoon epic, Pocahontas, featuring the voice of Mel Gibson. The American film magazine Premiere predicts it will be the most successful film of the summer, partly because of the four minute teaser for it on the zillion-selling video of Disney's last smash The Lion King. Premiere reckons this wheeze is "the most successful promotional tool in movie history".

Distributors usually try to avoid head-on clashes between competing blockbusters. Schwarzenegger's The Last Action Hero was trampled on by its direct competitor, Spielberg's awesomely successful Jurassic Park, two years ago. But this summer there are just too many blockbusters to avoid some clashes. Bruce Willis in Die Hard With a Vengeance (which has already taken $82m in the US), Stallone in Judge Dredd, Mel Gibson saving Scotland in Braveheart, Richard Gere as Lancelot and Sean Connery as Arthur in First Knight, Tom Hanks in the space drama Apollo 13. Then there's Kevin Costner's costly epic Waterworld, at $180m the most expensive film ever made. That needs more than a grand opening weekend to have any hope of recovering its costs - if it ever can. The stakes are high for all the studios this year. Six movies cost more than $70m, 13 cost more than $50m. Jack Valenti the head of America's Motion Picture Association says: "If some of these high-priced movies fail it will ring like twanging wire throughout our business."

For smaller films which can go on to major success, the opening weekend is usually a more focused affair. Polygram opened Four Weddings and a Funeral, the most successful British film ever made, in America before Britain. And they did it on just seven screens. "The opening weekend is still crucial," Julia Short says, "but you're going for a bigger take per screen and you're allowing word of mouth to build up. You go for a platform opening. We started Four Weddings on just seven screens, then moved up to 50, then 200."

Platform release is what companies do when they're not too sure of the product. Polygram did the same with Reservoir Dogs in Britain. "It had done practically nothing in the States so over here we just did 25 prints to begin with. Thanks to word of mouth we ended up with 150 prints."

A big opening weekend in the US or Britain doesn't mean a film will necessarily make money either. Four Weddings and a Funeral cost $4.5m to make and grossed $53m in America. It actually lost money there, however, after taking into account costs for marketing and release ($15m), distribution (a third of the gross) and the cinemas (45%).

"Films can't make money just from the US anymore," Ralph Ludemann says. "A good opening in America doesn't guarantee a money-maker. To recoup their costs, films must do well all over the world." Hold your breath a little longer, boys: Batman still has some way to go.