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.)

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.

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.

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.

Let me explain first why I’m reviewing a HP-related book on a LOTR-related blog. In part, of course, there’s an overlap between the two fandoms, but that’s not the real reason.

At this past summer’s Comic-Con, I attended a panel on “Muggles, Wizards, and Fans in the World of Harry Potter.” Among the presenters was Melissa, one of the guiding lights of the major HP website, “The Leaky Cauldron.” She revealed that Harry: A History was written with J. K. Rowling’s cooperation, to the extent that Melissa had interviewed her at length.

I was immediately intrigued, since cooperation in writing about big media franchises is so rarely granted to historians, be they academic, as in my case, or journalistic, as in Melissa’s. I had said in the preface to The Frodo Franchise, “No academic film historian has ever been able to witness part of the making of a blockbuster and talk to those working on it.” It appeared that Melissa had accomplished something similar.

In the question session after the panel’s presentations, I told Melissa that I had written a book on the LOTR franchise and was interested to learn whether she had had to sign a confidentiality agreement with Warner Bros. or had been under any legal requirement to show the manuscript to Rowling. Melissa said no to both.

The same had been true for The Frodo Franchise. Initially the person at New Line whom I talked with suggested that I would probably be able to interview some of the studio’s executives. Later I was told that I would receive a confidentiality agreement as a condition for those interviews. In the end, New Line, for whatever reason, decided not to allow the interviews. I never received the confidentiality agreement. My own surmise is that people at New Line were willing to let the filmmakers take responsibility for letting me have such privileged access, but they weren’t willing to deal with me themselves. Of course, I could be totally wrong about that.

Neither Barrie Osborne nor Peter Jackson nor any of my other interviewees ever asked me to sign anything or to promise to show all or part of the manuscript to them. I voluntarily offered to send each interviewer chapters where I used anything they told me; over half asked to read the relevant chapter, but only minor revisions and corrections resulted. No one asked for significant, substantive revisions. I was, in short, very, very lucky. So was Melissa.

Why are big media companies so reluctant to cooperate with historical studies of the important works that they create? I think it’s partly because there have been a lot of “gotcha” books written by journalists or non-academic historians who are more interested in gossip, dramatic behind-the-scenes revelations, and even scandal than in balanced, cool-headed accounts. That’s a real pity. Those books may be entertaining, but they’re usually not very reliable as records of what really happened.

I would like to think that once my book was published, executives at New Line looked at it and realized that it was a fair account of the events as they really happened—not at all a “gotcha” book. It’s true that the book mentions a few mistakes the studio made during the production and publicizing of the film. But it’s also true that New Line was going into uncharted waters by producing the three parts all at once. They were also dealing with a whole new situation in the world of popular culture, what with the LOTR fandom being so active on the internet from the start. Moreover, I think they simply did not realize until fairly late on just what a major, innovative blockbuster they had on their hands or how very broad its appeal would be. To their credit, they learned quickly from their mistakes and changed tactics to fit the phenomenon that the team in New Zealand created.

I would love to see people in the industry become more open to historians like myself having access to their projects. Melissa’s book, I think, can only help reassure them that there are historians who are also fans. We see the importance of these films (or books, in Melissa’s case) and want to record and explain their importance while they are still fresh, still being made. We are as concerned as the studios and filmmakers that spoilers not leak out.

As I just suggested, Harry: A History is more about the books than the films. Still, it does have sections on the relations between the various HP fan sites and Warner Bros., relations that went from distrust to acceptance and even cooperation—much as I describe happening with New Line and fan sites during the LOTR production. Melissa earned Rowling’s trust through her work on “The Leaky Cauldron,” a site devoted to bringing accurate news to its readers.

And trust is the key in such situations. In her acknowledgements, Melissa thanks Rowling and refers specifically to “her trust.” Similarly, Barrie Osborne’s trust in me, based on assurances from a mutual friend, made The Frodo Franchise possible. I said so in dedicating the book to Barrie. Contacting powerful people involved in creating popular, lucrative franchises and gaining their trust is not, to say the least, easy. But again, both of us were very, very lucky. Melissa clearly justified the trust placed in her, and I hope I did as well.

That rather long-winded explanation should suggest why I’m reviewing Harry: A History here.

Despite the overlap, our two books are not all that similar. I was trying to pull together all the disparate components of the LOTR franchise to give not only a history of the film’s making and impact, but also of the phenomenon as a whole. As part of my account, I dealt with fandom and how websites affected the marketing of the trilogy. Melissa’s viewpoint is of a very influential fan who ended up writing for and eventually running such a website.

Melissa makes it clear early on that she is not going to be critical of the big-business forces behind the HP books and movies. A newcomer, she says, “might easily look on the franchise and assume it was pieced together by cunning businessmen, deployed via market data, and carefully contrived to give people exactly what they wanted at exactly the moment they wanted it most, using tested formulas, celebrity horsepower, and the kind of advertising push that fuels mega-industries like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Microsoft” (p. 18). Melissa gradually came to know the executives at Scholastic, the American HP publisher, and the publicity people at Warner Bros. Eventually she was being invited to the sets of the films and to their premieres. It’s clear evidence of how the owners of the franchise and the devoted fans can help each other, the fans providing publicity and in exchange gaining access.

The book is essentially Melissa’s autobiography as a fan, from her first discovery of HP to her marathon interview with Rowling in the autumn of 2007. Within that context, she gives a history of the book and film series. She’s done the sort of background research that one must in dealing with such topics as book publishing and the internet, as when she sets the context for Rowling’s launching in on writing the series: “The children’s book industry in Britain, meanwhile, was undergoing an increasingly politically correct era, producing stories that were purposefully devoid of the traditional fairy-tale whimsy driving Jo Rowling’s new work” (p. 20). Similar helpful information is given about the development of the internet and of fan sites.

Melissa also writes in a way that conveys the excitement of fandom. She describes marathon reading sessions when she and her friends assembled after the release of some of the volumes. She was present at some of the book-release midnight parties and toured with the band “Harry and the Potters.” Finally, she makes clear the social aspect of fandom; friends she made via the internet become a major part of the cast of characters.

The book ends months after the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007. The last events are Rowling’s Carnegie Hall revelation that she thought of Dumbledore as gay (which I wrote about here) and Melissa’s interview with Rowling. That interview gives more information about that revelation, as well as other topics.

Definitely recommended, then, both HP fans and those interested in the fandom phenomenon as such.

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.)

So why make a sequel? The Guardian points out that Universal saw that the first film made a lot in its DVD release. In Chapter 7 of The Frodo Franchise, I talk about how some franchises start because a film does well on DVD. That was especially true at New Line Cinema, where the original Austin Powers, Blade, and Rush Hour films didn’t take in a lot at the box office, but their DVDs did; the sequels all distinctly outgrossed their predecessors (p. 206).

Universal was confident enough about a possible Hellboy franchise that they kept on director Guillermo Del Toro and gave him a budget of around $80 million, up from the $65 million of the original. As the article points out, Hellboy II will need to make over $100 million in the U.S. for Universal to consider it a success. That won’t earn a profit, but it will provide enough of a sense of the film’s being a hit that DVD sales will most likely be strong. $200 million would make it a “phenomenon,” but that’s not likely, what with The Dark Knight and other stiff competition coming up.

I note that after the weekend, on Box Office Mojo Hellboy II has slipped to number 2, behind Hancock. Number 2 in total domestic gross, that is, but actually it’s doing better than Hancock. Why? Here I’ve blogged about how to read the sorts of box-office charts that appear on Box Office Mojo and on the various Monday-morning reports of weekend figures. Hellboy II is playing in 3,204 theaters, Hancock in 3,965. If you look at the per-theater average ticket sales, Hellboy II made $1,160 on Monday, Hancock $961. On Tuesday Hellboy II made $995, Hancock $885. By that measure, Hellboy II is still number 1. (Actually Journey to the Center of the Earth, New Line’s new release, is playing in only 2,811 theaters and averaged $969 and $944 on those two days, slightly edging out Hancock for #2.) If you’re a theater owner, that’s obviously the figure you care about. More ticket buyers not only ups your share of the take, but it means more concession-stand sales, which is where theaters make their profits.

So, while Hellboy II may not make $200 million, it’s doing pretty well so far. GDT has expressed interest in making a third installment once he’s finished with the Hobbit and “Film 2” projects. If enough of us buy the Hellboy II DVD, maybe Universal will be keen on the idea.

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.

No word yet on who will direct the third film.

Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s new CEO, announced the decision to downsize New Line as the first step in his plans to streamline the corporation and bring stock prices back up. AOL, a much bigger headache than New Line ever was, is reported to be the next problem he will tackle.

Now news is slowly coming out suggesting that the changes in New Line may not be quite as great or as swift as the announcement suggested. Toby Emmerich is reportedly being wooed to stay on and head the studio. It also turns out that there may be an obstacle to Warner Bros. immediately taking over New Line’s international distribution.

Anyone who has been following the Time Warner/New Line drama knows that part of the huge media empire’s decision arose from New Line’s habit of financing its films by pre-selling the foreign rights to distributors abroad. (I describe how that works and examine a case study, the Danish distributor SF Film, in Chapter 9 of The Frodo Franchise.) That worked just fine with The Lord of the Rings, since the income was big enough for everyone to get a healthy share. The Golden Compass made only $70 million in the U.S., and yet it will top $280 million abroad by the time its overseas runs end. Those foreign distributors get to keep all or at least most of what they earn. So New Line might not lose much on the fantasy epic, but it won’t make a profit from theatrical runs. (The film’s reported budget was $180 million.)

In its February 28 story, Variety said, “Contrary to rumors that New Line’s patchwork of international output deals would prevent wholesale change, Bewkes said many of those deals were due to expire anyway and said it made sense for New Line to stop selling off international rights to finance films. ‘With the growing importance of international revenues, it makes sense for New Line to retain its international film rights and to exploit them through Warner Bros.’ global distribution infrastructure,’ he added.”

(In the odd parlance of film distribution, “international” means outside the U.S. and Canada, and “worldwide” means, well, worldwide.)

Now, according to a March 14 story by Variety’s Adam Dawtrey, it turns out that those rumors Bewkes dismissed are probably true. New Line’s “patchwork of international output deals” exist, and they’re not expiring all that soon. Many of the foreign distributors who handled LOTR had multi-year output deals with New Line, and those have probably been renewed since the trilogy came out. (An output deal means a foreign company distributes all or most of a season’s slate of pictures made by a studio.) These companies include Entertainment in the U. K., Metropolitan in France, Village Roadshow in Australia, Svensk in Scandinavia, Nu Metro in South America, and Gaga in Japan.

These companies bought into the “His Dark Materials” trilogy and have the first option to distribute the second and third films (if any) in their respective countries. Given that the first film did so well abroad, many might well take up that option.

Dawtrey adds, “Warner’s lawyers will doubtless be scouring the fine print of those deals. If the studio does decide that it wants to continue with the franchise—and that’s a big if—it faces a tricky calculation and negotiation over how much of the world it is prepared to give up in order to do so.”

Other New Line films are also contracted to the same independent distributors, including Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D, Sex and the City, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Final Destination 4, and My Sister’s Keeper. As Dawtrey says, New Line’s output deals “effectively run to the end of 2009.”

It sounds as if Time Warner announced the downsizing of New Line without first taking a close look at just what that entailed. Now that they are scrutinizing the studio’s situation, they’re may be finding that changes aren’t as easy to make as they thought.

As to how the foreign output deals will affect Warner’s decision about the “His Dark Materials” sequels is anyone’s guess at this point. But one other consideration that Dawtrey doesn’t mention is the DVD of The Golden Compass, due out April 29. If the DVD is a big hit (and kids’ videos tend to do well), that might tip the balance in favor of making sequels. That’s what happened with Austin Powers, where the first film’s box-office performance was so-so, but its DVD sales led New Line to produce a second film. Yes, these days DVD sales are that important.

Given that the first Hobbit film isn’t even in production yet and is still announced for a late 2010 release, it shouldn’t be affected by the output deals. Presumably Warner Bros. will release it and its companion film internationally itself, though, as I suggested before, New Line’s logo will probably be on them as the production company.