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Most studio men will be happy to settle for megaflashes in their July and August releases. The biggest question mark encases the Disney organization's TRON, a $21 million sci-fi chase set inside a video game; it boasts some elegant computer-graphics effects and a heart as cold as freon (see box). Following TRON into the theaters are Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Robin Williams in The World According to Garp, Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton snuggling up in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a highly touted comedy called Young Doctors in Love, Henry Winkler as a morgue manager in Night Shift, Richard Gere in the gaudy An Officer and a Gentleman, and Summer Lovers, Director Randal Kleiser's first dip into soft-core sentiment since his sleeper hit The Blue Lagoon.
If all these films fill moviemakers with a mixed sense of hope and anxiety, the reason is that they are all unknown properties—and, as Frank Mancuso, Paramount Pictures' head of distribution, points out, "the American public tends to spend money on what it knows." That means sequels. In the 1960s the James Bond series proved that sequels could make lots of money, not just the traditional formula of 50% to 60% of the original film's revenue. In 1974 The Godfather, Part II legitimized the sequel as a popular art form; and in 1980 The Empire Strikes Back vaulted to second place on the all-time hit list (trailing only its big brother, Star Wars). "The Empire Strikes Back taught people to trust sequels," says Sid Ganis, vice president of marketing for Lucasfilm, Ltd., the company that produced the Star Wars series (with Revenge of the Jedi due out next May) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (with a sequel due out in the summer of 1984).
It also taught the studios. The stampede was on: the gold rush had become the old rush. Of the 110 movies announced for release by the six major companies within the next year, 17 are sequels—from The Sting II to Halloween 3, from the fourth Cheech and Chong farce to the seventh and eighth Pink Panther comedies. No hit, however venerable, is immune to the virus: Disney is preparing a Return to Oz, and Universal has begun shooting Psycho II. Paramount is planning eight tightly budgeted Star Trek films, one to be released every 18 months. Also from Paramount is a movie with the definitive rip-off title Airplane II: The Sequel.
Sequels have an honorable place in the history of movie art and commerce. From Charlie Chaplin through Garbo and Harlow and Harpo, actors developed screen personalities that changed little from one film to the next. They were their own sequels. And the conventions imposed by genre and the strict Production Code assured the moviegoer that all dilemmas would be resolved, all sins rigorously punished, all endings sealed with a kiss. The watchword was continuity—a familiarity that bred the happy addiction of mass moviegoing. In 1946, 4 billion tickets were sold.