Movies Finances

The hip-hop film "Save the Last Dance" keeps grooving along at the box office, finishing in the top spot for the second week in a row while easily fending off two new movies featuring a pair of Hollywood's biggest stars. "Save the Last Dance," starring Julia Stiles as a fallen ballerina who recaptures her passion for dancing, grossed $16 million over the weekend, in its second week of release, according to studio estimates released Sunday.

This report is based on projections of total U.S. box-office gross from a consensus of industry sources and studio financial models. The U.S. returns represent only 20% of a film's final revenue, which includes income from video, TV and overseas theatrical release. Typical industry marketing costs are factored into this profit analysis. Results for the weekend of Jan. 12-14: * Highlights: * "Save the Last Dance" looks to be 2001's first major profit maker.

Come Oscar time, Ang Lee's martial-arts romance "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" will surely win awards. And a special statuette should go to the film's co-writer and producer, James Schamus, for a remarkable performance by a financial acrobat. Schamus delivered an epic network of cross-cultural funding. He not only found financing for the arthouse fare, but he managed that feat with a $15-million Chinese language film, one of the worst box office bets around.

If "Little Nicky" is any indicator, New Line Cinema may be about to relive its darkest hour. The ill-conceived Adam Sandler comedy cost a whopping $80 million to make, more than $35 million to market, and it won't gross more than $45 million in U.S. theaters. The maverick company with a stellar track record for hitting it big with smaller, relatively inexpensive movies, such as the "Austin Powers" series, is playing the major studio game of paying top dollar for stars, scripts and sets.

Several major Hollywood studios are working vigorously on plans for selling movies directly to consumers over the Internet, hoping to thwart Web pirates from undermining their copyright protections. Sony officials say they are preparing a site for downloading movies to personal computers beginning next year. Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox also are talking about jointly providing movies to PCs, said industry executives close to the negotiations.

Movies that are perceived to be in trouble wave any number of red flags. First and foremost, production drags on for extra months as the budget spirals upward. The director may be a tyrant like James Cameron on "Titanic." Or he may simply lose control of his $100-million budget, as Kevin Reynolds did on "Waterworld." A sullen male star may hole up in his dressing room snorting cocaine.