Variety reports that today Paramount and Sony announced a U.S. release date for The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn: December 23, 2011. That puts it right up against The Hobbit’s first part, also due that month. Actually, the film will already be out in other countries. The film is being released in various foreign countries in October and November. The idea is that Tintin is better known abroad than in the U.S., and favorable early buzz will help the film there. The film is going to be released in 3-D–though at the rate that theaters are currently converting to digital and 3-D, it’ll probably have to show on a lot of regular screens as well.

The Secret of the Unicorn is the first of three Tintin films originally announced. Steven Spielberg is directing this one, and Peter Jackson is to direct the second, Red Rackham’s Treasure. Tintin Movie.org has revealed some highlights from the 20th anniversary issue of Empire which was edited by Spielberg. It states that the second Tintin film is already in pre-production and that there are no plans for the third film so far. Also, “in the original test reel, Jackson played all the parts.” Presumably that’s the test reel for the new motion-capture process invented at Weta Digital and being used for both the first and second parts. (Nothing on Empire’s own website so far, but apparently the new issue is already out in the U.K.)

Variety has a couple of news items that caught my eye, each with a rather tenuous connection to LOTR.

First, the Twilight franchise is going strong, with the announcement that the third film in the series, Eclipse, has been greenlit by Summit Entertainment–the lucky little company that couldn’t find a distributor to handle Twilight and ended up distributing the film itself. The second film, New Moon, hasn’t even started filming yet, though it will soon. And who is directing it? Chris Weitz, who made The Golden Compass, New Line’s intended franchise to follow up LOTR. If that film had succeeded, he most likely would not be available to join this more successful franchise.

Second, The Dark Knight has become the fourth film to gross more than a billion dollars internationally. As you all no doubt know, Titanic was the first, with the apparently unbeatable total of about $1.8 billion. The Return of the King remains at number two, with $1,119,110, 941, according to Box Office Mojo, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, sits not far behind it at number three. The latest Batman installment crept above the billion mark by being released into Imax theaters on January 23, the day after the Oscar nominations were announced. All this is in dollars not adjusted for inflation. If we did adjust for inflation, RotK would be further ahead than it now seems.

Variety just announced that Twentieth Century Fox has taken over co-financing of the Chronicles of Narnia series a month after Disney decided to opt out of it. Fox had originally gone after the production rights to C. S. Lewis’ fantasy novels but had lost out to Walden. The Fox deal was not unexpected, since the two companies share a marketing and distribution firm, Fox Walden. As the article puts it, “The Century City studio [i.e., Fox] seems to be an ideal fit for the ‘Narnia’ books given that it’s been looking for a family-friendly, lit-based franchise for years–Fox 2000’s ‘Eragon’ filed to catch on with audiences and died after one installment.”

After The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a huge hit at $745 million internationally, Prince Caspian’s take of $419 million was considered enough of a decline for Disney to drop the series, especially since Caspian cost about $215 million to produce. Even so, it was the number 10 grosser internationally last year. The third film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (referred to only as Dawn Treader in the article), is planned to cost a relatively modest $140 million.

Negotiations about scripting are still going on, but Fox and Walden hope to get the film into principal photography by the end of this summer and out for the holiday season at the end of 2010. The director will be Michael Apted, with Mark Johnson (an old friend and one of my interviewees for The Frodo Franchise) and Andrew Adamson (director of the first two films in the series) as producers. Apparently Australia is being considered as the location for the bulk of the filming.

After the post-LOTR failures of a number of big-budget fantasy franchises, it’s good to see that this one will survive, at least for a while.

Today The Hollywood Reporter posted a story by Borys Kit announcing that Disney has decided not to co-produce the next Chronicles of Narnia film with Walden Media. Kit speculates that Twentieth Century Fox may take over as Walden’s partner.

Kit also comments on the possibility that the fantasy vogue started by the Harry Potter and LOTR films may be waning:

It is rare for a studio to pull out of a planned trilogy in midstream, but the number-crunching showed a franchise on a downward trend. “Lion” roared to $292 million domestically and another $453 million internationally in 2005. This year, “Prince Caspian” grossed a healthy $141 million in North America and another $278 million internationally, but that was well off the “Lion” take.

Further challenging “Treader” may be a waning of the pricey children’s fantasy genre. When the “Harry Potter” series topped the book charts and then filled movie theaters, studios began snapping up fantasy manuscripts as quickly as they could. When “The Lord of the Rings” showed it was possible for adults to enjoy the fare as well — and produced the boxoffice results to prove it — Hollywood’s fascination with the genre intensified.

But no other fantasy adventure films have shown that kind of boxoffice punch. Earlier this year, Warners and New Line hoped they were launching a franchise with “The Golden Compass,” but the adaptation of the Philip Pullman trilogy tanked domestically.

The film grossed just $70 million domestically and the co-production partners declined to go forward with a second installment despite the fact the film did take in more than $300 million overseas.

Of course other fantasy adaptations have failed to launch franchises. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and Eragon came and went without sequels.

In Chapter 9 of The Frodo Franchise, I wrote about the impact the LOTR film trilogy had on giving the fantasy genre both respectability and financial success. If Kit is right, that impact will have been short-lived. One test, I suppose, will be Inkheart, produced by New Line and announced for January 23, 2009. If that flops, studios will be even less willing to take a chance on fantasies.

One obvious problem is that these films tend to cost a lot, given the special effects involved. If a film has a $200 million budget (not counting marketing), a $370 million worldwide gross doesn’t seem that impressive. After all, half or less of that comes back to the studio. (Far less than half in the case of The Golden Compass, which New Line financed in part by selling off the foreign distribution rights.)

There’s no one answer as to why attempts to imitate the success of HP and LOTR have fizzled. In some cases the original literary work isn’t strong—but that’s hardly the case with the Narnia and His Dark Materials books. Both the HP and LOTR film series have benefited from having continuing stories, while the Narnia books are fairly self-contained—but that’s not true of The Golden Compass, despite the film’s attempt to downplay the cliff-hanger ending of the first book. Then there’s the issue of the film’s quality. I’ve never read Eragon, but I found the movie pretty flat.

Peter Jackson’s team, New Line, and we are all very fortunate that there’s more Tolkien available to extend their fantasy franchise. Making the fairly safe assumption that The Hobbit is a big success, I wonder if studios will begin the whole process of imitation again. And there are three more HP films to dangle the vision of fantasy-fueled box-office riches before the studios.

On my recent trip to Jordan, one of the books I took along to read was Melissa Anelli’s new title, Harry: A History. The cover describes is as “The true story of a boy wizard, his fans, and life inside the Harry Potter phenomenon.” It’s one of those books that’s ideal for traveling: a lot of prose in small print packed into a light-weight, compact volume.

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I was very surprised to read on Variety’s website today that the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is being put off from its scheduled date of November 21 to July 17 of next year. Not that that exactly has anything to do with The Lord of the Rings films. Still, many of you will remember those exciting days of late 2001, when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (November 16) and The Fellowship of the Ring (December 19) were about to come out so close together. To some extent they were seen as competing with each other. Well, that may make for a more dramatic news story, but it turned out that there was plenty of enthusiasm about both–and plenty of wealth to share. Two of the biggest film franchises were thus launched only about a month apart.

The Harry Potter films were recently touted as the highest-grossing franchise of all time. True, HP’s $4,485,097,295 total is higher than LOTR’s $2,916,919,070. But it’s five films to three. Averaging them per film, HP comes out at $897,097,259 and LOTR $972,306,356. But however you count it, they’ve both done really, really well. And if we were to adjust total grosses for inflation, I suspect James Bond would still come out on top, given how many films there have been, and Star Wars would be right up there as well.

Warner Bros. produced and will distribute Half-Blood Prince. According to Variety it has delayed the release in order to beef up its summer schedule for next year, which is weak on blockbusters as a result of the recent Writers Guild of America screenwriters’ strike. Up to now, Terminator Salvation had been its only “tentpole” picture for that season. Released in July, 2007, Order of the Phoenix grossed $938,468,864, and WB is hoping that history will repeat itself. So it’s a strategic move, not one that has anything to do with problems relating to the production of the film itself.

That means we’ll get the last three HP films in the summer of 2009, autumn of 2010, and summer of 2011, the latter two dates being announced for the halves of The Deathly Hallows. Conveniently enough—if all goes as planned—The Hobbit will appear in December of 2011, with “Film 2” announced for December 2012. So after a long pause in the wake of The Return of the King, the two franchises sort of come together again, with the LOTR series reviving just after the HP films end. Given that Warners will be distributing The Hobbit and “Film 2” for New Line, it will be virtually guaranteed some big hits during that period.

By the way, Daniel Radcliffe appears on the cover of the upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly, which contains its annual fall movie previews. Bad timing, but I would imagine that Warner Bros. can get another cover story next summer for its HP release. Time Warner owns Entertainment Weekly.

(I’m currently plowing through the many legal documents that have been filed recently in the Tolkien Trust’s lawsuit against New Line, including the texts of the 1969 contracts for the deals selling the film rights of LOTR and The Hobbit to United Artists. I hope to post a summary within a few days.)

Yesterday Guardian.co.uk posted an interesting piece on Hellboy II: The Golden Army as a franchise film. The first Hellboy was produced by Revolution Studios and distributed by Columbia. It grossed a bit under $60 million in the U.S. and around $100 million internationally. On a $66 million budget (as listed on Box Office Mojo), that’s not enough to turn a profit, since of course a slice of that gross stays with the theater owners. more »

Despite The Golden Compass‘ less than sparkling performances at the U.S. box-office, New Line seem to have gone for an attractive DVD presentation. Like The Lord of the Rings, the two-disc set is in the Platinum series. It has “only” two and a half hours of special features, but just about anything would look short compared with Michael Pellerin’s splendid making-of films on the trilogy’s extended-edition DVDs.

Variety’s review praises the “intricate behind-the-scenes look at the film’s award-winning production design team” and adds that “the pre-production docs are top notch here, beginning with “The Alitheometer,” a meticulous portrait of the prop team’s research and assemblage of the Golden Compass or “truth measurer” in four weeks’ time.” The reviewer adds, “Another bright spot is “Armoured Bears,” a fascinating breakdown of the panserbjorne fight sequence, which took animators a grueling six months to create, starting with a “hokey” reenactment using paper miniatures, a foamcore arena and a lipstick cam.”

Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman did not participate, but I’m usually more interested in what the craftspeople, technical experts, and director have to say.

The set’s extras include “the ‘Launch’ scenes at the Cannes Film Festival.” I’m glad someone had the foresight to films that event. I only wish there was some footage of the extraordinary party that New Line put on during the Cannes Film Festival of 2001. (Maybe there is some somewhere, but all I’ve seen are some brief, shaky images of some of the guests arriving.)

It’ll be interesting to see how sales go. I suspect the set will do well; DVDs for kids usually do. Whether it will sell enough copies to justify adapting the second and third volumes remains to be seen.

Variety blogger Anne Thompson is reporting today that Steven Spielberg will direct the first of the three planned Tintin movies, with Peter Jackson directing the second. She got the news from an interview with Andy Serkis (undated, unfortunately, but March 13 or earlier judging from the first comment) that appeared on indieLONDON. The films will be done in digital 3-D using motion capture. Serkis has of course had a great deal of motion-capture experience, having played Gollum and King Kong. (In the interview he talks a little about working on The Lord of the Rings and King Kong.) Now he’ll be returning to New Zealand to play Captain Haddock. According to him, principal photography begins in September, but he said he would soon be going to Wellington to do some preliminary work.

No word yet on who will direct the third film.

Back on February 25, when Variety announced that Time Warner was going to fold New Line Cinema into Warner Bros., it all seemed so simple. New Line’s staff would be severely cut back, it would abandon its current offices and move onto the Warner Bros. lot, and Warner would take over distribution of all but the firm’s immediately upcoming films. Most of the top executives would leave, right away in the cases of Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, after the transition in the cases of Toby Emmerich (president of production) and Rolf Mittweg (head of international distribution). Apart from The Hobbit and a few of its other successful franchises, New Line would be confined to low-budget genre fare of the type that defined it back in the 1980s and early 1990s. more »