ROTTEN TOMATOES: Studios Planning for Fewer Sequels in 2008

Studios Planning for Fewer Sequels in 2008

We know you're so disappointed.

by Jeff Giles | January 03, 2008

If you're the type of moviegoer who greets the annual wave of sequels with groans and eyerolls, USA Today has some good news for you: In 2008, you can expect to see far fewer of them at a theater near you.

According to USA Today's report, only 16 sequels are on the '08 docket, a steep drop from 25, which has been the average since 2003. As the article notes:

Five of the six biggest movies of last year were sequels, helping propel 2007 to about $9.6 billion at the box office, a record -- though attendance remained flat from last year, according to Media By Numbers.

Not that Hollywood has lost its love for series and spinoffs. This year still has plenty of high-profile franchise wannabes and sequels, from Jan. 25's Rambo to May 2's Iron Man to May 22's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Hollywood hasn't lost its love for big-budget blockbusters, either; Warner Bros.' Jeff Goldstein is quoted as saying "You have to give people things that home theater systems can't give audiences," and to that end, the studios have lined up all manner of gimmickry intended to put butts in those cushy theater seats. Read on:

About 80% of the nation's theaters have gone to stadium seating. U2 has a 3-D movie due Jan. 25, and next year's Final Destination 4 hopes to make you think the blood really is oozing on the screen. Hollywood is hoping James Cameron's computer-generated epic Avatar gets older moviegoers back into the seats.

Finally, one last bit of news comes from Harvey Weinstein, who claims his studio will be cutting back on "overly violent movies," saying "people want movies that aren't just reflections of our times."

Fewer sequels? Less blood? What's going on around here? What's your take, RT faithful?

Source: USA Today

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(1-20 of 54 posts) | Reply

BrianInSD writes:
on Jan 03 2008 08:53 AM

Practically every franchise out there released an installment in 2007 so it's hardly surprising that there aren't as many to release in 2008.

What Harvey Weinstein doesn't seem to realize is that it's not the overly violent nature of his studio's films people object to but rather to the fact that the majority of the Weinstein Company's releases have sucked. The violence was the LEAST objectionable aspect of Hannibal Rising.

(Reply to this)

crystalwhiteeyes writes:
on Jan 03 2008 08:59 AM

Starting the year off in a good direction! Less sequels, less blood! I'm sure when the writers come back, we'll get more nonsense. Here's to hoping they get a real job!

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opTIMus Nerd writes:
on Jan 03 2008 09:08 AM

Don't worry folks! It looks as if the new Rambo will have sequel and blood enough for all!

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Shatter24 writes:
on Jan 03 2008 09:17 AM

Sequels and blood! Sequels and blood! What are we men or mice?

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dahluzz writes:
on Jan 03 2008 09:29 AM

it wasn't the gore that turned people away from Grindhouse, the Weinstein studio's biggest blunder of the year, it was the terrible advertising (not helped by the accurate word-of-mouth that 'death proof' sucked). sorry 'hoodwinked' is one of your studio's top grossers, harv.

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fullmetalnek writes:
on Jan 03 2008 09:58 AM

Damn! I need some gore!

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BlueMobius writes:
on Jan 03 2008 10:00 AM

"...helping propel 2007 to about $9.6 billion at the box office, a record -- though attendance remained flat from last year..."

Um, has the irony in that statement hit anyone else? How could the box office break records when attendance was down from the previous year? Could it be that they're charging more per movie? I'm sorry, I'm not impressed by the dollar amount as much as I am concerned that people aren't seeing movies anymore. One used to have to get to the theaters at least a half hour early to guarantee a seat and it was likely that any new release would be sold out on a Friday night and packed three-quarters to full during its first weekend. Now? Most movies I see are only half full, new releases aren't sold out, and you can show up five minutes before show time and most likely get a good seat. The only movies that seem to follow the "sold out" trend anymore ARE the sequels and "franchise wannabes."

Just something I noticed.

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Derbeste writes:
on Jan 03 2008 10:03 AM

I actually do think there is something to the "too much blood" philosophy. I think torture porn and gross out movies are designed to shock rather than entertain. It's a fine difference. You simply cannot hold a broad audience's attention for very long on shock. Furthermore, if nothing is left to the imagination, the mind ends up bored rather than engaged. It's gotten to the point where shock has been used to distract from the fact that movies have little to no story - rather than compliment it.

So winstein is actually right....if only by coincidence.

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Gimy writes:
on Jan 03 2008 10:37 AM

Grindhouse failed because of the advertising? dude, try TIME! thats the biggest reason it failed. everybody i know who saw it LOVED it. problem is, not everybody has 3 hours to watch a flick thats NOT on dvd...

an arguement about "too much blood" only applies when there's NOT ENOUGH everything else. THAT is the main problem in these newer horror flicks, they spend more time on makeup and special effects rather than material(comedy, scare tactics, STORY, acting, characters) and it just comes out stupid. alot of them(saw, halloween, urgh...hostel 2) appear to be so amateurishly done...that watching it makes you think they're first time movie makers. you can gore the h3ll out of a movie IF you have strong support(hostel 1) around it. if the rest sucks, the entire movie sucks...regardless of gore.

i'm pretty sure this isn't OVERALL sequels though(only releasing in theaters). keep in mind, ALOOOOOT of sequels go straight to dvd(bring it on, american pie, sandlot...etc). so i hardly think this report is accurate. its basically saying the big budget(thought out bullsh3t) is cutting back? to me, that means nothing as long as they keep releasing stupid sequels on dvd...

(Reply to this)

EDmanwalking writes:
on Jan 03 2008 10:47 AM

On the violence debate, movies like Saw and Hostel are doing no good with their "torture-porn", but what of moviemakers like Scorsese, who depicts violence with consequences, or the Coens, who meditate on the violence within our world rather than just imitate it for cheap thrills?

(Reply to this)

BuckyUnderbelly writes:
on Jan 03 2008 10:49 AM

I think the number of sequels is likely to dip even more in 2009 if the WGA strike goes on much longer. Here's why ...

It's not because studios WANT to make fewer sequels ... but they just can't hire the writers right now to keep pumping them out. Because films take a year or two (or more) to make, the impact of the strike on the movie biz really won't be noticeable to us until late '08 or early '09. (Unlike TV which got hit harder up front.) I'm sure the studios would LOVE to have lots more of profitable, cookie-cutter sequels in the development pipeline right now, but they can't roll forward without any writers.

So the strike may be forcing some originality out of Hollywood. Which could be very exciting.

The other intriguing issue that may arise from the strike is the fact that there will be tons and tons of spec scripts on the market once the writers come back to work.

(A spec script, for those that don't know, is a script that a writer writes "on spec" ... meaning ... they write the whole thing and then hope to sell it later on. This isn't the most common way to sell a script, incidentally. Most often writers are either hired for an open writing assignment -- say, for a sequel that the studio is going to make no matter who writes it -- or they go in and pitch an original idea to studio executives who then agree to pay them to write it.)

Anyhow, with all the writers currently barred from working on studio projects ... you can bet that most of them are taking advantage of the hiatus to write their bliss. They're no doubt dusting off all those old ideas that they've always loved but that everybody said weren't marketable enough. So, when the strike is over, there are going to be lots of passion projects flooding the market.

So, ironically, the writers going on strike and interrupting the flow of the Hollywood product/profit pipeline MIGHT actually mean that we eventually get lots of new and original movies over the next couple of years.

(Reply to this)

FlapJack writes:
on Jan 03 2008 10:50 AM

Yay! I think they are going to try a new route. Say...prequels?

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Bigbrother writes:
on Jan 03 2008 11:07 AM

In reply to this comment (#1423754)
That's true, but just because a film is bloody doesn't make it inherently a bad movie. Sometime when the film maker knows what he's doing lifelike violence enhances the film. Look at Braveheart at one point during the film blood actually splatters the camera, by accident or on purpose I know not, but it made me and my friends leen in closer to the screen and whisper "Awesome" which should be the ultimate goal of any bloody violence and then they went back to awesome story telling, top notch character acting and fun dialog. Blood and gore can't hold up a crappy movie, but it can make a good movie better.

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kdbarrett writes:
on Jan 03 2008 11:13 AM

As for box office numbers, I've always been suspicious of using strict cash numbers as a measure of a movie's success because of inflation, more theaters (there are more and more where I live, anyway), less matinee pricing, etc. I think there should be more indices and ratios, such as the number of theaters, number of seats, and how many of those available seats did it fill? If one movie is released in 3,000 theaters but only sells about 2,000 theaters worth of tickets but another one is released in 1,500 theaters and fills them all, that, to me, is a more successful movie, even if it made less cash. The box office reports do occasionally address limited release movies and receipts per theater in those cases, but I just think there should be more of that.

(Reply to this)

Mackey23 writes:
on Jan 03 2008 11:19 AM

The Dark Knight and Indy 4...enough said.

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BuckyUnderbelly writes:
on Jan 03 2008 12:20 PM

Yeah, I've personally always found the whole practice of using the movie's grosses as a benchmark for their success (instead of number of physical tickets sold) to be a little dishonest. Especially when the high grosses these days seem to be more a function of the rising ticket prices than of a movie's actual popularity.

But studios will never let go of the practice, because they love to crow about how they're setting records. It's a very useful statistic ... especially when you're crafting a TV ad campaign. It's always impressive to trumpet that your movie has broken this record or that one.

But if they went strictly by NUMBER of tickets sold ... well, they'd never get to trumpet about breaking any records. Because nobody would EVER beat Gone With The Wind ... which hauled in around $400,000,000 in worldwide grosses (NOT counting inflation) ... BACK IN 1939! Back when a movie ticket could be had for a few coins and a bit of pocket lint!

So when it comes to how many tickets were actually sold ... modern movies just can't even dream of approaching those numbers. The world, the business, and the marketplace ... have simply changed too much.

(Reply to this)

horrorfan666 writes:
on Jan 03 2008 01:29 PM

I would really like to see a sequel to HALLOWEEN. I thought the cast thats left over is terriffic; scout taylor compton, Malcom McDowel, Danielle Harris, Tyler Mane.... it could be really good if they found a good director to take over.

(Reply to this)

rt_hire_me writes:
on Jan 03 2008 02:04 PM

Didn't Brad Bird unlock the mystery to good movie making in an RT interview a couple months ago? 1. Story 2. Story 3. Story. Less blood? Sequel? Who cares.

I did appreciate the fact that I Am Legend could have been an R-rated hell-fest but wasn't so that I was able to watch it with my son. So yeah, you can put less blood at #4.

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PlanBFromOuterSpace writes:
on Jan 03 2008 02:06 PM

A quick search, courtesy of infoplease.com, turns up:

"The big-screen adaptation of Gone with the Wind premieres, and will go on to gross $192 million, making it one of the most profitable films of all time. It's also one of the longest films, clocking in at 231 minutes."

That's going all the way back to 1939, including re-releases, etc., not figuring in inflation. Clearly, you are out of your mind. There weren't even $400,000,000 worth of moviegoers back then. That would be 1.6 billion people, assuming that everyone that saw it had seen it once.

The "Gone With the Wind" argument has always bothered me, as no one ever seems to figure in other factors. Today, you obviously have way more entertainment options and outlets. Sporting events and concerts certainly make more of an impact than they did back then. To say that the Internet, or rather the illegal pirating and distribution of movies online, takes a chunk out sort of goes without saying. Video games didn't exist. Most importantly, there was no TV really. There was no "Oh, I'll rent it when it comes out on video". The studios, of course, were aware of this, and if you think the advertising and marketing of a film are shameless NOW, you should take a look at what they used to do. There was a possibility that you would never again have a chance to see a film after it left theaters (or more importantly, no additional way for the movie to make money), and they made sure to exploit that.

You have to put things in perspective when looking at this argument. There's no fair way to say that (minus inflation) "Gone With The Wind" would be the highest-grossing movie ever if you pitted it against all the other contenders at the same time, in the same environment. Unless someone is going to go back in time and hand MGM a check for 1.4 Billion dollars (its approximate adjjusted gross), it's really not an argument.

Speaking of which, I wonder what it's adjusted COST would have been. At the time, I believe it was the most expensive film ever produced. No one ever talks about that. Would it be a legit blockbuster, or would it be considered a "disappointment" like so many of this last couple of years' $200,000,000 grossers?

To get somewhat back on topic though, money is all that matters to the studios that make these movies. 9.6 billion dollars is a lot of money, no matter how you slice it. Whether people paid the 1939 price of 23 cents to see a movie or if it was just 10 people chipping in a billion apiece, the money's the same in the end.

(Reply to this)

Uradik Smoke writes:
on Jan 03 2008 02:59 PM

I am predicting the 2 biggest movies of 2008 will in fact be a Sequels...

The Dark Knight and Indy 4 will account for close to a billion dollars in domestic box office ...

Long live the sequel for movies we actually want to see ...

And to be fair i would say 2007 was the year of the Threequel ...

(Reply to this)

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