There's no doubt that next Wednesday's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" will be among the year's biggest blockbusters, on track to record one of the best opening weekends ever. But when the fighting machines take a breather, Warner Bros. is betting the battlebots won't have conquered one critical audience segment: women.
In releasing its kid-with-cancer tear-jerker "My Sister's Keeper" directly opposite the "Transformers" sequel, Warner Bros. is following a summer counterprogramming strategy that has yielded a number of female-driven hits -- "Mamma Mia!," "Sex and the City" and "The Devil Wears Prada" at the top of the charts -- and a handful of summer chick flick underachievers, including "Made of Honor" and "License to Wed."
School's-out movie slates historically lean heavily toward young men, and this year is no exception. Most of the summer's highest-profile releases -- "Star Trek," "Terminator Salvation," "G.I. Joe" and the "Transformers" sequel -- live and die on the attendance from people who think Slim Jims and beer constitute a food group. But with so much testosterone spilling out of the multiplex, several distributors believe now is the time to tilt the scales back toward women.
This coming weekend, Disney will unveil its Sandra Bullock-Ryan Reynolds romantic comedy "The Proposal," having moved the film up from a tentative fall date (and then away from "The Hangover") into the middle of the summer fray. Audience tracking surveys suggest the film could bring Bullock one of her best openings ever (none of her previous movies has grossed more than $18 million in its premiere weekend), and "The Proposal" appears certain to hammer the other new wide release, "Year One" (which is looking more like "Land of the Lost II").
A week later, "My Sister's Keeper," an adaptation of the bestselling Jodi Picoult novel starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric, will go toe-to-toe with the second DreamWorks-Paramount "Transformers" film (the action sequel opens on Wednesday, while "My Sister's Keeper" premieres two days later, on June 26). And in one of the more interesting summer showdowns, Sony's Meryl Streep and Amy Adams food-filled romance "Julie & Julia" will hit theaters the same weekend as Paramount's militaristic shoot-'em-up "G.I. Joe."
"By Aug. 7, moms will have taken their kids to a lot of shows over the summer," says Jeff Blake, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, "and it's time for them to ask, 'What about me?' It's tangible that people want something else."
