Word: spider
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When you've got a franchise like Spider-Man, you'd be a fool to pay an actor $20 million; Tobey Maguire got $4 million. Studios will work even harder to find scripts like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Incredible Hulk in which the idea itself is the marquee. One irony of all this is that it makes movies more like television. Says Walter Parkes, the co-head of DreamWorks' film division: "The network-television business is really about three things: demographics, scheduling and series. We're becoming a little bit like that...
...driven off the lot that first week. But movies, as our proudest and most exciting cultural export, are monitored by Americans the way they used to watch the NASDAQ. There's a kind of pride that we can blow $115 million in one weekend on a comic-book movie; Spider-Man was our May Day. And if $115 million of fun was going on in one weekend, people want to be at the party...
...billion year for movies, up more than 10% from last year's record. As always, summer, teeming with bored teens willing to see films more than once, is blockbuster season, and this summer is almost certain to be the biggest one ever, thanks in large part to Spider-Man and Star Wars, which opens this week. At evenly spaced intervals throughout the summer, we'll line up for a handful of blockbusters. And unless you live in a city, they are pretty much the only ones you'll be able to see until the leaves turn in the fall. This...
Tobey Maguire, as many have noted, is an unlikely action hero. Then again, so is Spider-Man. Maguire's own background as a lonely California kid may have been better preparation for his break-out role as the angst-ridden Spidey than hours in the gym. Before Spider-Man made him internationally famous, Maguire was known as one of Hollywood's go-to actors for troubled-youth parts: a neglected loner in The Ice Storm (1997), a teen yearning for escape in Pleasantville (1998), an orphan searching for a home in The Cider House Rules (1999), a self-destructive college...
...Maguire is being compared to DiCaprio--another serious actor turned teen idol following a big mainstream hit. But though audiences may cling to Maguire as Spider-Man, it's unlikely they'll embrace his quirky persona in standard leading-man roles. He simply isn't as warm as Tom Hanks or as dashing as Tom Cruise. "I just want to make good movies," says Maguire. "If there's a script I like with a character I like and a filmmaker I like, I would do the movie. I'm not really concerned about money. You could say I'm even...