Talk about a traffic jam.
There's the 405 North in L.A., there's the Holland Tunnel in NYC and then, from "Fast Five" to "Green Lantern" to "Cowboys and Aliens" and everything in between, there's the summer movie season of 2011.
Starting on April 29, when Universal releases its fifth "Fast and the Furious" movie, the studios will cram no less than 14 big-budget tentpoles into a time period measuring only about 12 weeks in length.
"That's a big movie every single week, and that's rare," said Chris Aronson, executive VP of distribution for Fox.
"Kids aren't going to have $14 to spend at the movies every single week," noted the executive producer of one high-profile summer sequel (who's studio asked that he not be named). "Which one of the four big movies in June is going to earn that 14 bucks, because it isn't going to be all of them."
Certainly, with the studios spending, on average, $200 million or more to make each of these tentpoles, and other $100 million plus to market them worldwide, the stakes are high.
"You have to wonder how much box-office room is there," said Vincent Bruzzese, president of the motion picture division for research firm OTX. "Could they all make $300 million? We'll celebrate if that happens, but something tells me it's not going to."
Indeed, the big movies this summer are under pressure to produce big $60 million, $70 million, $80 million-and-above domestic openings. Start out to anything less than that, and they're putting huge pressure on the foreign market to help them achieve profitability. The domestic market might just be too crowded for big second- and third-week performances.
The record number of movie ads during the Super Bowl told the story -- studios, including Paramount, which has a number of big films on the summer calendar, weren't shy about ponying up $3 million a pop for 30-second commercial pods, given the Darwinian level of competition this summer.
But in this kind of summer, building huge awareness among moviegoers with big ad spending might not be the complete answer.
"I'm going to rip up tracking because it's going to be useless," Bruzzese added. "All of these films will have huge amounts of awarenesss and will be loaded toward the opening week."
Of course, the summer season is always chock-full of big releases -- and the movie business could certainly use a spark, given that it's currently down 28 percent year to year.
But too much might be too much -- in fact, filmmaker Jon Favreau, who will debut his Universal/DreamWorks film "Cowboys & Aliens" on July 29 into this maelstrom, told the L.A. Times that this coming summer is going to be a "bloodbath."
"There's never been a summer like this next summer," he said. "It's going to be bloody.
