Forget 'Cars,' Hollywood Needs a Lifeboat

Call it car-ma: 'Cars' has met an 'An Inconvenient Truth.' It won't be the panacea for Hollywood's box office malaise. The Pixar film's $62.8 million opening weekend was less than Hollywood was expecting (maybe because it failed to feature any hybrids?) but it's paltry only when compared with what the last two Pixar movies have done.

Of course, that won't stop a few snarky comments from being uttered about the movie's slightly-under-expectations opening, as you can see in the Los Angeles Times today: "Pixar is like the parent who has a straight-A student: One day the child comes home with a B-plus," said Anthony Valencia, an analyst at money management firm TCW in Los Angeles.

But what's really vexing Hollywood isn't opening weekend -- it's the weekend after that.

The number two film in the country, 'The Break-Up,' plunged 48 percent to take in $20.5 million this weekend. 'X-Men 3: The Last Stand' deflated by 54 percent to an estimated $15.6 million.

True, 'X3' is now the top-grossing picture of the year to date, and "The Break-Up" is cruising towards $75 million, but those kind of drop-offs aren't any fun to watch if your movie's a flop, and any movie, hit or flop, can expect to lose nearly half its audience every weekend. Consider "Posieidon," the $150 million epic which opened at a waterlogged $20 million, then plunged to the bottom of the ocean floor. The film has yet to make back the money it cost to advertise it, let alone make it.

Reports of the success of 'X3' and 'The Da Vinci Code' trumpet that theatrical gross is up 5% over last year, while admissions are up 1%, thanks largely to the overseas appeal of those movies.

But what they ignore is the grim fact that box office is still 10% behind that of 2004, and that's despite 'The Da Vinci Code' surpassing 'The Passion of the Christ' at the ticket window.

So what is a terrified, top-heavy, overspending entertainment business to do?

Well, interestingly, Variety today carries a story about the launch of Reelz, a new cable TV network that will soon launch with 28 million subscribers. Reelz chief selling-point? A place to tub-thump and hawk Hollywood's movies even in the weeks after they've opened.

Says its president Rod Perth, "I think the major studios should have a stake in our success because they're constantly looking for new ways to get the word out about their movies ... The studios stop promoting their movies after they leave the theatrical and DVD windows," he said. "We'll keep doing shows about the movies when they get to video-on-demand and pay TV and basic cable."

Will this cure the feast-or-famine nature of Hollywood filmmaking? Probably not.