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Bet you didn't. Bet you something else too: that the Messrs. Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen are just as surprised as you are. When it comes to the movies, we are all hostages to the conventional wisdom of the moment--the smart and the smarter, the dumb and the dumber.
A year ago, acting on that wisdom, Katzenberg was getting ready to release The Lion King, and even then, before the $315 million rolled in (not to mention the record $450 million in home-video sales it has racked up in the past two weeks), it didn't look like a high-stakes gamble; Disney animation has been a sure thing ever since Beauty and the Beast. At the same time, Spielberg was preparing to send forth The Flintstones (domestic gross: $135 million), and that was a pretty sure thing too. Lesser men than he had observed that the boomer market was about to turn into a nostalgia market; how could you go wrong with a movie based on the TV show that had addled their little pates 25 year earlier?
If the DreamWorks people were looking over their shoulders, then they were probably worried about Maverick (more recycled television, this time with big stars), about The Client and Clear and Present Danger (best-seller adaptations, also with reliable stars) and about True Lies (Arnold, armed, dangerous and in his best mode, the high-tech thriller). All these movies did all right--a little bit less or a little bit more than expected, but in the ballpark, if not always in the field of dreams. But they weren't Gump or Pulp or Weddings, either. That is to say, the sneaky, relatively unheralded, relatively inexpensive latter have probably turned a better profit than the relatively expensive former--at least in the U.S.
And you know what? They were more fun too. Because they were unexpected. Because you emerged from them with a sense of discovery, even of exhilaration, that more predictable ventures, however nicely they are put together and marketed, never impart.
This is not to say that movie executives ought to act like they're in the derivatives market. You can do all right playing by the well-established rules. Indeed, you probably have to most of the time. No board of directors is going to question you too quickly for hiring stars with a track record and putting them in genre vehicles that have some prerecognition value. Even when one of these flops, you can always invoke the prudent-man defense. Hey, I did it by the rules; it's not my fault if they didn't come.
But it's necessary to break this basic rule from time to time. There's a paradox here. Big action-packed movies are thought to be less risky these days than their less costly competitors. Those stars, those production values, those clichas can bail you out in foreign box-office and home video, which, unlike the domestic theatrical business, are truly mass (i.e., highly conservative) markets. Smaller movies, starring less potent performers, on the other hand, offer no downside protection. They may represent a smaller investment, but they also pose the risk of near total loss.