The opening of “Harry Potter VIII” this weekend, along with “Transformers III” and “X-Men: First Class,” reminds me of a story.
It was the mid-‘80s and I was still covering the industry for Newsweek. I was having lunch with David Matalon, boss of the upstart studio Tri-Star, discussing the surprising tracking for the upcoming film “Rambo: First Blood, Part II.” Predictions were for it to be the hit of the summer, which it turned out to be.
That surprised me. After all, outside “Rocky,” which by that point had run its course, Stallone had never shown pop at the box office. Don’t believe me? Let’s see: “F.I.S.T.,” “Paradise Alley,” “Victory,” “Rhinestone.”
“You’re missing the story,” Matalon corrected. “The success of ’Rambo’ isn’t Stallone. It’s the next big trend in movies -- the sequel. The sequel is going to be the biggest star in Hollywood, bigger than Stallone, Newman, Harrison Ford ...”
It took a couple of years, but as the surfeit of sequels this summer shows, he was prescient -- the sequel has become the biggest star in the firmament. While there’d always been sequels -- think of James Bond -- structural changes were making sequels more valuable than ever.
Prior to the ‘80s, for example, sequels were either based on book franchises like Bond or hugely successful movies like “Star Wars.” “Rambo” was something new -- a sequel based on a largely unheralded film. In the ‘50s, ‘60s or ‘70s, far from spawning a sequel “First Blood” would have been consigned to the dust bin of a studio’s library. What changed was the addition of new platforms for the exploitation of movies, things like the then-new cable networks, home video and the promise of almost instantaneous pay-per-view.
That meant an arty film like “First Blood” (by the Canadian director of “Duddy Kravitz”) and which barely lit up the box office (its $47 million gross was mediocre even for those days) could be discovered later by a bigger audience than ever saw it in theaters.
I discovered the truth of that maxim myself almost exactly two decades ago from another legendary studio mogul, Jon Dolgen. By then I had moved to Sony’s Columbia Pictures, where Dolgen was studio chairman and I worked as an executive for Academy Award-winner Michael Douglas’ and former HBO head Rick Bieber’s Stonebridge Entertainment.
I’ve written earlier how Stonebridge had forged an unlikely hit called “Flatliners” from a script by an unknown writer, a modest budget ($15.9 million) and a cast of up-and-comers and comeback kids (TheWrap, 11/9/2009.) For instance, when we cast Julia Roberts “Pretty Woman” hadn’t yet come out -- she was best known for her breakthrough role in the indie “Mystic Pizza.” And Kevin Bacon had made one bomb after another following “Footloose” including “The Big Picture” and “Quicksilver” (about bicycle messengers!)
Yet, “Flatliners” opened #1 and finished with a box office total of some $150 million -- in the days when $150 million was still a big hit and not just the first days’ gross!.
