Tatiana Siegel, "The Hollywood Reporter," film reporter: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1 How do you measure the summer? Baseball games, picnics, trips to the beach? Around my house, it’s the Monday box office scores – rounded to the nearest million dollars, of course.

The first three big movies of Summer 2007 – Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and Shrek the Third – all opened with predictably big weekend hauls. But these three sure things didn’t overwhelm the general movie-going public quite the way most observers thought they would. All three have been panned by critics and aren’t generating the buzz many expected.

Their performance opened the door for something a little less spectacular – the new Judd Apatow movie, Knocked Up, which has won rave reviews and could gain even bigger audience as the long hot summer continues – at least until the new Harry Potter movie opens.

To talk about this summer’s movies – as well as the just-completed Cannes Film Festival, which she attended – I invited The Hollywood Reporter's Tatiana Siegel to join us today.

For the past four years, Siegel has worked at The Hollywood Reporter covering the economics of the entertainment industry. She tracks three major studios: Sony, Paramount, DreamWorks, and MGM. Siegel also covers the agency beat, following the behind-the-scenes developments at such talent powerhouses as CAA, William Morris, and Endeavor.

She has interviewed hundreds of studio executives, producers and directors and enjoys unique access to agents, managers and publicists.

In this entertaining, informative, audio interview, Siegel reviews the financial performance of the summer's first blockbusters; offers her opinion on Pirates' second week box office plummet; points out the shrinking number of women directors in Hollywood; describes the scene at this year's Cannes Film Festival; explains why Frank Miller's adaption of Will Eisner's The Spirit moved up on the schedule and Sin City 2 stepped back; and finally, why Ari Gold and Vincent Chase still matter.


BOB ANDELMAN: I mentioned in the introduction that some of this summer’s movies have not held up the way many people thought. Would you say the summer has been boffo or bombo?

TATIANA SIEGEL: I would say boffo. I think the box office in general is doing great. It’s allowing several different types of movies to excel and do well. You have, obviously, the sequels, the Pirates of the CarCaribbean, Shrek the Third, and Spiderman 3, but you also have smaller films, like Knocked Up, doing very well and exceeding expectations, so I think it’s a healthy, robust box office this year.

ANDELMAN: All three of the big ones, though, have had drop-off after the first week, and of course, that’s expected. You don’t expect the movies to do $100 million dollars every weekend, but has it been more acceptable for some than for others?

SIEGEL: I think so. I think that with Pirates of the Caribbean, it was a really big drop-off from the first weekend to the second weekend. Normally, 50 percent is sort of acceptable, and Pirates fell 62.4 percent, so that’s actually a big drop, and when you’re talking millions of dollars, it’s a lot of money, so that was probably a disappointment for Disney. Of the three big sequels, even though it’s made a lot of money so far, that’s the one that seems to be more sort of in danger.



ANDELMAN: Where you are and the circles that you travel, what’s the explanation for that fall-off? That’s pretty big.

SIEGEL: Yes. I think that probably it suffered from the same thing that King Kong did a few years ago. It’s nearly three hours long, and people, I think, just sometimes don’t have time to see three-hour movies. King Kong was a fantastic movie and was one of the best-reviewed movies of the year that it came out, but it was 3-plus hours, and it’s a big commitment. I think there’s a perception that there’s no reason for an action movie to be three hours long. Keep it tight, keep it two hours, and everyone’s happy. Spider-Man also was a long movie, two hours and twenty minutes, and I think that it felt long when you actually were in the theater watching it, that there were scenes that sort of went on longer than were necessary. Not the action scenes, of course, but some of the scenes felt a little bit long, so I think that there’s a little bit of a backlash toward that. Why make a movie that long?

ANDELMAN: I know in our house, my wife and my daughter and I saw Spider-Man the day that it opened, and my 10-year-old and I were very pumped up. The theater here in St. Petersburg, Florida, had just outfitted itself for IMAX, so we were especially excited. We were going to see it in IMAX on the opening day, and a funny thing happened. My daughter and I were very excited and having a good time, but we came out of there, and my wife was shell-shocked. The action and the violence and the special effects and the IMAX effect, it actually overwhelmed her, and it was two hours and twenty minutes, it was a long time to be drawn into that.

Another thing that happened was that when Pirates opened, my daughter went on the last day of school with a bunch of friends from school. I picked up her and a couple of her friends afterwards, and they had an interesting response: my daughter was all enervated, that’s just the way she is with the movies, but her friends were physically and mentally exhausted and overwhelmed by the violence and the non-stop action. I haven’t seen it yet, but they literally were too tired to even talk about the movie, and none of them wanted to see it again, which is a very different response than they had to the first two movies. I wondered if anyone had considered that aspect. With Pirates, the first two movies seemed to be pretty good for children. It’s a little much, but they really enjoyed it, and they really got into it, but this one, it doesn’t seem like it’s quite made for the same audience.



SIEGEL: I think you raised a good point, where it’s exhausting. When you look at a movie like Titanic, which also was three hours or so, people could handle seeing multiple times because it wasn’t non-stop action. It was a love story. It was obviously special effects-laden, but it was a story, too. When you have these movies that are just one explosion after another, to make it three hours is almost too much for the audiences.

ANDELMAN: So the good news in this, I guess, is that it opens the door for people to want to go see a nice, calm comedy, like a Knocked Up. Is that right?

SIEGEL: Right, because the people are at the theaters and maybe one show is sold out and they’ll see another show, and Knocked Up did very well. It made nearly $30 million in its first weekend, which was what its budget was, so that’s obviously a success, and I think that the studio, which was Universal, would have been happy with anything more than $20 million. It definitely exceeded expectations. It’s a movie that probably won’t drop dramatically in its first weekend to second weekend and will continue to through word of mouth draw more audiences. It has had very good reviews, unlike the Pirates, Shrek the Third, and Spiderman 3, so I would imagine that people will see it in the second or third weekend and it’ll do very well this summer.

ANDELMAN: It’s interesting that this movie pretty much establishes Judd Apatow, that there’s an Apatow kind of movie now.

SIEGEL: Right.

ANDELMAN: The 40-Year-Old Virgin, things like that, but who else benefits from the success of this movie? Is it Katherine Heigl, is it Seth Rogen?

SIEGEL: Yeah, definitely. He is sort of now looking like the next Steve Carell as far as the guy you want to cast in your comedy. He also will be in another Judd Apatow film called Superbad. That’s a Columbia Pictures, and in fact, today I reported in The Hollywood Reporter that Apatow had just set up another film with Jack Black and Harold Ramis, who’s one of the legends of comedy. He wrote and directed some of the classics from the ’70s and ’80s, and he’ll direct a project called Year One for Columbia Pictures. Michael Cera, who’s not a big name, is one of the sort of Apatow up-and-comers. He played George Michael Bluth on “Arrested Development.” He will also star in this film. Judd Apatow works with the same people over and over again, and he makes these less big names become big names. Steve Carell wasn’t a big name before he was in 40-Year-Old Virgin, so I think that as a comedy actor, obviously, it’s great to be in a Judd Apatow movie.



ANDELMAN: Now, you’ve mentioned Steve Carell, so I want to ask you about Evan Almighty, which is due this summer, the sequel, sort of, to Bruce Almighty. Carell, up until this point, seems like he can do no wrong, and yet, anyone who’s seen the trailers for Evan Almighty has got to be scratching their head. There is nothing funny about it. Is there any buzz on this movie that we could discuss? Are you hearing anything?

SIEGEL: You know, it is a strange choice for him, because he just did Little Miss Sunshine, which was a fantastic career move, because even though he didn’t make a zillion dollars doing it, it put him into this sort of category of Oscar-nominated type movies. To do Evan Almighty, I’m not sure if it was just a paycheck kind of move, but it doesn’t look like anything fresh or original. It looks like a lot of rehashing of the first one and sort of a Jim Carrey type project. Jim Carrey’s having trouble booking movies. I think that type of humor has been superseded by the Judd Apatow type of humor right now or people from “The Office,” a little bit more ironic and wry as opposed to just straightforward kind of goofy laughs.

ANDELMAN: It’s interesting. Bruce Almighty, Jim Carey had Steve Carell to pick on. That’s what made the movie in a lot of cases. That was the humor of the movie. But here, it just doesn’t fit. I hope I’m wrong, because we certainly enjoy Carell, but it just doesn’t look like it’s going to work.

SIEGEL: Even if it doesn’t, he will still be making movies. He’s booked pretty solid for a while.

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Labels: Knocked Up, Sicko, Spider-Man 3, Tatiana Siegel, The Hollywood Reporter, The Spirit

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