With the high profile Ashton Kutcher/Katherine Heigl Killers already bombing at the box office, Hollywood may experience a record number of other high profile films that will also tank this summer. My early predictions are for Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice, Warner Bros. Jonah Hex, and FOX's double bomb with the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz vehicle Knight & Day and FOX's A Team, it is likely the Summer of 2010 will go down in Hollywood history as a summer to forget.
Also, 2 other high profile films, Shrek 4 and Sex and the City 2 also underperformed compared to their predecessors. This will inevitably lead to every national magazine that covers Hollywood to say, "The U.S. audience has grown tired of sequels." They will mention some sequels that grossed more money than their previous films and some that grossed less - all the in name of "objectivity," when it really just filling column inches. Look, it's very simple, the global audience does not care if there is a number after a film title, they just want to see a good movie.
The real problem with sequels was brought up to me by my friend Tom DeSanto. Tom is the second highest grossing producer in Hollywood with the X-Men & Transformers films under his belt. Tom had this built up fan bases for Transformers 2 that was totally squandered when the film was more loud that interesting. Tom tells me that it is his and Michael Bay's job to make Transformers 3 much better than 2 to get the fans from Transformers back into cinemas again. That's the only real risk with sequels, underdeliver for your audience and you have to make a better film to win them back. Better to make great sequels than uneven ones.
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