The Sequel Strikes Again as Box Office Success
LONDON (Reuters) – Coming soon to a cinema near you: “Return of the Sequel.”
The box office success of movie sequels over the past few years has Hollywood sticking to the formula and banking on a fresh wave of them for 2005, with new episodes in the “Star Wars,” “Batman” and “Harry Potter” series on their way.
The relative financial success of sequels lately has had cinema owners reaching for the number “2” and the word “return” more often than ever for their marquees.
Of the $20 billion earned by films and their sequels at the U.S. box office from 1980, 38 percent came from the first in the series and 36 percent from the first sequel, indicating that sequels perform on a par at the box office with the original, according to research published Monday by Screen Digest.
Studios issued a record number of 15 sequels in 2002, and 14 each in 2003 and 2004, and they have been rushing the second and third installments to screens more quickly.
Screen Digest found that the average lag between sequels was three years between 1980 and 2004, but in more recent years the gap has fallen to about a year.
Though the research focuses on U.S. box office success, sequels dominated screens around the world last year as audiences turned to the comfort of their favorite characters.
In the UK alone, four sequels — “Shrek 2,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Bridget Jones — The Edge of Reason,” and “Spider-Man 2” topped the list of the five highest-grossing films. Only “The Incredibles” at No. 4 was not part of a series.
“Movie sequels have been a key driver of recent sustained box office growth, with some of the highest grossing titles part of a franchise,” Screen Digest analyst David Hancock said.
NOT MERELY COPIES
The success of recent sequels is owed to scripts that don’t always simply retell the same story in the same way the original did, a common complaint among movie-goers.
“‘Lord of the Rings,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Spiderman’ and ‘Shrek’ are all examples of how creatively strong a sequel can be, proving that it is no longer a cynical option but a clever marketing strategy to build on a good idea and an audience base rather than exploit it,” Hannock said.
The highest-grossing series of films in the United States is “Star Wars,” with the five films raking in $1.4 billion, according to Screen Digest, with the three-part “Lord of the Rings” the only other series to top the $1 billion mark.
The “Spider-Man” series, however, has earned the highest per film average on U.S. screens, $376 million for its two titles, and “Shrek” is second with an average of $351 million.
Action films dominate the world of sequels with 51 movies or nearly three out of every 10 over the last quarter century, Screen Digest found. Comedy (18 percent), horror (16 percent) and sci-fi (14 percent) are the next most popular genres.
The firm also found that May, June and July account for about half of all sequel releases.
The longest-running series, since 1980, is “Friday the 13th” with 11 installments, and $309 million of total gross proceeds.
Excluded from the study — which only accounts for films first released in 1980 — is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s James Bond and Pink Panther franchises, as well as such popular film series as “The Godfather,” “Mad Max,” “Jaws,” “Halloween,” “Airplane” and “Superman.”
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