Had enough popcorn (films) yet?

After a season of dinosaurs, apes and big guns, movies turn serious. This is the season they get dressed up for Oscar, after all. But more about that later.

The fall lineup does seem to have one parallel with summer: event pictures. This time, there are three—Monsters, Inc. (Nov 2), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Nov. 16) and The Fellowship of the Ring (Dec. 19), the first of three Lord of the Rings movies.

"These are event pictures on a par with anything that's been released so far this year, or even over the last five or 10 years," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Co., Inc.

Beyond the Big Three, it's shaping up to be a big season financially, too. One reason is summer is going out with a bang. Planet of the Apes ($68.5 million the weekend of July 27-29), Rush Hour 2 ($67.4 million Aug. 3-5) and American Pie 2 ($45.1 million Aug. 10-12) each opened with record box-office performances that are generally only seen on holiday weekends like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July.

Thanks largely to that end of the summer rush, the season is running about 11 percent ahead of last year (as of Aug. 26) and looks to top the record $2.86 billion in tickets sold in 1999.

"What a strong summer finish does is it keeps people interested in going to the movies," Dergarabedian says. "You've got people going to theaters exposed to the trailers, posters and everything else about the movies." What moviegoers will see this fall are stars—and lots of them. Many of Hollywood's biggest names, absent during the summer, will be filling the screens in the weeks ahead. Jim Carrey. Tom Cruise. Gwyneth Paltrow. Michelle Pfeiffer. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Will Smith. Denzel Washington.

Many of them will be striving for awards nominations, particularly the biggie, Oscar. Last year at this time, the two frontrunners and eventual big Academy Award winners—Gladiator and Erin Brockovich—had already exhausted much of their box-office magic.

This year, it's a much more wide-open race. So far, the only shoo-ins that have been released are in the minor categories such as special effects (Jurassic Park III, The Mummy Returns, Pearl Harbor) and makeup (Planet of the Apes), or the new animated feature arena (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Shrek).

The fall release schedule—particularly from early November through the end of the year when there's at least one new high-profile title each week—promises to be a windfall for online ticketing agencies, such as AOL Moviefone, Fandango and MovieTickets.com.

"No matter how many screens a movies is playing on, what you're still seeing is a lot of theaters are selling out. When Planet of the Apes came out, a good percentage of those theaters were sold out," says Fandango's John Singh.

The Santa Monica-based company—which serves 5,000 screens nationwide at Carmike Theatres, Century Theatres, Cinemark Theatres, Edwards Cinemas, General Cinema, Loews Cineplex and Regal Cinemas—reported a 91 percent increase in the number of daily visitors to its site from May to July. Singh predicts another major jump this fall.

The big attraction: being able to buy tickets up to three weeks in advance to avoid opening-weekend sell-outs of the most popular showtimes.

"When a big movie comes along, and a studio does its marketing and does it well, what it means is people want to get out there and be among the first to see that movie," Singh says. "Just like a hot, new restaurant, you're not going to walk up to the podium and say you want to sit down. By the same token, for the hot new movie people realize it behooves them to have a reservation to see that movie."

- by Jerry Rice [September 3, 2001]
Courtesy of The San Bernardino County Sun
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