Even with the recent shuttering of Time Warner Inc.'s specialty labels Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse and the folding of its New Line Cinema into Warner Bros., the newcomers are ramping up their annual slates. Overture and Summit each plan to release a dozen films a year.
Many top executives whine about the "excess of product," but few have done much about it, at least so far. Only one studio, Walt Disney Co., has scaled back its release slate in a meaningful way, to 13 last year from 19 in 2006. A decade earlier, the Burbank studio released 25.
Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger confronted the issue at a recent investor conference in New York: "Too many movies are being released into the marketplace. They can't all be good enough or marketed well enough to drive good returns."
This week, Time Warner Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes addressed the glut in a meeting with Wall Street analysts. "We are basically going to be running, a year or so from now, at a title volume that is more like half what it was two years ago," he said, adding that by doing so, "we believe we can move the profit up."
Paramount executives expect to put out fewer movies because of the recent decision to scale back the Paramount Vantage art house label -- and because of the expected departure of its DreamWorks live-action unit, though those titles could go out through a rival distributor in a net wash.
Rarely is there a weekend when multiple movies aren't vying for screens and in many cases the same audience, especially during such peak moviegoing seasons as summer, fall and winter holidays.
This summer, Disney's much-anticipated sequel "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian," got upstaged by two behemoths opening in proximity, "Iron Man" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
"There were these giant vacuum cleaners on either side of us, and it took significant amounts of business away for our movie," said Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook.
Specialty distributors feel the pinch too. Not only are they spending more than ever on marketing -- a 44% jump last year to an average of $26 million per picture -- but in many cases their releases are getting booted off screens before being able to build word of mouth.
Fox Searchlight had high hopes for "Young at Heart," a feel-good documentary about a chorus of rock-singing seniors, when it was released two months ago to gushing reviews. But when it didn't immediately catch on, it got kicked out of Hollywood's Arclight Cinemas after just three weeks.
