Content area
Full Text
Would all you people buying tickets to "Twister," "The Rock" and "Mission: Impossible" please knock it off? You're giving Hollywood headaches.
The three movies have earned a combined $517 million, which is alleviating a lot of the pain. But the fact that the shows are so popular that they're still among the top-drawing films is making a mess out of the summer release schedule.
We have to go back to May to put the confusion in perspective. With 80 potential releases on the docket, distributors had lined up the busiest summer in history in what was shaping up as the busiest year in history, surpassing the 419 movies released last year.
The logic behind this onslaught was that several of the heavily hyped special-effects extravaganzas released in May and June would bomb, leaving room for other heavily hyped special-effects extravaganzas to take their place in July and August. But not only are the early releases not bombing, they're hardly fading. "Twister," "The Rock" and "MI" are tying up 4,280 screens that were supposed to have been used for other movies.
This bottleneck at the box office has had a ripple effect. Date changes have become almost a daily affair. Some distributors have...