Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession

On July 4, 2003, three highly touted studio soldiers were sent to battle for the hearts and souls (and wallets) of American moviegoers. That was the weekend that Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator 3 collided Reese Witherspoon's Legally Blonde 2 and Brad Pitt's Sinbad in thousands of theaters across America. In Open Wide, veteran Hollywood journalists Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing brilliantly illuminate this quest for box office supremacy. chronicling the nerve-wracking months leading to that summer showdown, following every key decision that took these movies into the nation's multiplexes. They watch as focus groups of suburban teenage girls critique movie trailers and advertising campaigns. They are in Cannes when Terminator 2 robots are unleashed and in London for Legally Blonde 2's lavish, chaotic press junket. A mammoth convention in Las Vegas finds celebrities and studio executives mingling awkwardly with small-town theater owners and vendors hawking high-concept snacks for adventurous concession stands. The films are screened, tested, and frantically re-cut. Publicity stunts are engineered and theater exhibition chains are booked. Star egos are stroked and the Terminator himself announces his campaign for the California statehouse. As the clock ticks down to July 4, opening weekend becomes a moment of eager expectation for some and utter dread for others. And, inevitably, the numbers arrive.

Open Wide shines a bright light on the secretive inner workings of Hollywood's vast sales and marketing machine, past and present. As the authors explore how and why box office receipts have evolved from a closely guarded corporate secret to a national obsession, they bring acute insight to an industry that is increasingly devoted to producing the next big blockbuster—the next high-concept, future-franchise picture that they can "open wide."

Customer reviews:

Tons of facts!, 2008-09-26
This reasonably current appraisal of the film market is quite well written, and uses a lot of real world examples that are familiar to most if not all movie lovers. It's a tad long but easily accomplishes it's goal of illustrating the dismal state of the industry. Great to use for quotes.

The History and Realities of Opening a Profitable Movie. , 2008-02-26
In "Open Wide", Variety editors Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing explore the phenomenon of the big opening weekend that often determines a film's fate in Hollywood's current economic climate. No longer do films build popularity; they must grab it up front in order to be profitable. "Open Wide" examines how saturation came to be the standard method of releasing big-budget films and the realities of marketing films this way. Hayes and Bing chose three big summer movies -"Terminator 3", "Legally Blonde 2", and "Sinbad"- to follow from concept until their opening on July 4th weekend 2003.

The authors recount the marketing maneuvers of these three contemporary films and give the reader a history of movie marketing over the past few decades, in particular those sea changes that created the "open wide" phenomenon. We follow the three films for about 6 months of fine-tuning and marketing, through focus groups, television ads, test screenings, ShoWest, fan conventions, trailer houses, junkets, tracking reports, and, finally, their flashy, nerve-wracking premieres. The degree to which audiences and statistics shape big-budget movies cannot be overstated.

How things got this way is even more fascinating. Hayes and Bing take us back to the first saturation marketing schemes that fueled the popularity of monster and exploitation films in the 1950s, the application of those strategies to "Jaws", creating the first summer blockbuster in 1975, how and why the industry became obsessed with numbers, the pioneers of movie data-gathering, and the evolution of the multiplex theater. All of this leads to the films, the publicity, and the people who make them today. This specialized history of film marketing is entertaining and insightful for both film buffs and professionals.