Studios hope holiday movies bring good cheer

By Lauren Hunter
CNN Showbiz Today Reports

"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" opens November 16 Click here for more movies

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- 'Tis the season for a little movie magic, as more than 50 films open in theaters over the next six weeks. It's one of Hollywood's most competitive seasons as studios vie for the green of box office bucks and the gleam of Oscar gold.

"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (Warner Bros., November 16) is expected to be one of the season's cinematic juggernauts. It's adapted from the first of British author J.K. Rowling's hugely successful children's books about a boy who discovers his magical powers.

The film previewed in England on Saturday and brought in the equivalent of $5 million at about 480 locations, the highest single-day gross in British history.

"Harry Potter" is expected to go head-to-head with J.R.R. Tolkien's highly anticipated "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring" (New Line, December 19) in which Elijah Wood plays Frodo, leading the epic journey to Mordor without being corrupted by the ring.

Both movies are expected to work their magic with audiences, says Anne Thompson, the West Coast editor of Premiere magazine. "We are going to break the box office record this year and we're heading very close to it right now," she says.

According to A.C. Nielsen figures, 2001 is nearly 10 percent ahead of last year's box office figures, with a year-to-date total of $6.6 billion in receipts.

'People want to be at the movies'

Thompson says moviegoers are flocking to theaters, despite studio concerns that business would be negatively affected following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"People want to escape. It's the same thing that happened in other bad times, like the Depression," she says. "People want to be at the movies, they want to be in that community in the theater together sharing, and they're going (to the movies) and they're going to continue to go."

Hollywood studios tried to anticipate the mood of audiences. "Sidewalks of New York" (Paramount Classics) opens November 21, about two months after its original release date, while the release dates for Martin Scorsese's graphic "Gangs of New York" (Miramax) and John Woo's World War II movie "Windtalkers" were both pushed to next year.

Yet the audience's patriotic mood seems high, and the debuts of two other military-minded films, "Behind Enemy Lines" (Twentieth Century Fox, November 30) and "Black Hawk Down" (Columbia, December 28) were moved up.

"Spy Game" (Universal, November 21) and its world of international espionage also seems to have taken on greater relevance in today's post-attack environment. Robert Redford and Brad Pitt star as CIA operatives.

"It is topical," Redford told CNN. "Now it's topical as a national issue, an international issue, really. Intelligence is not just exclusive to the United States -- it's an issue and a game that's been played around with for the last 50 years."

Theaters full of stars

Redford and Pitt are just two of the galaxy of stars headed to theater screens this holiday season.

The remake of 1960's "Ocean's Eleven" (Warner Bros., December 7) boasts an all-star cast including George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle and Bernie Mac, while "The Royal Tenenbaums" (Touchstone Pictures, December 14) has Gwyneth Paltrow, Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover and the Wilson brothers, Owen and Luke.

Kate Winslet and Judi Dench play the young and the old novelist Iris Murdoch in "Iris," (Miramax/Dimension, December 14) then Dench stars opposite Kevin Spacey in the adaptation of the best-selling novel, "The Shipping News" (Miramax/Dimension, December 25).

Will Smith gets physical as boxing champ Muhammad Ali in "Ali" (Columbia, December 25) while Russell Crowe goes cerebral in "A Beautiful Mind" (Universal, December 25), about a mathematical genius afflicted with schizophrenia.

"It's about a fellow called John Forbes Nash," says Crowe, last year's best actor Oscar winner for his role in "Gladiator." "He was in Princeton in the late '40s and in the early '50s he wrote some papers on a thing called game theory ... and in '94 he was presented with the Nobel Prize for economics for that work he'd done."

Michelle Pfeiffer is Sean Penn's lawyer in "I Am Sam" (New Line, December 25) about a mentally-challenged father fighting for custody of his daughter, and Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz star in director Cameron Crowe's version of "Vanilla Sky" (Paramount, December 14).

"I like the way he calls it," says Cruise, referring to Crowe's description of the film. "It's not a remake, but it's a cover of a great song." The movie is an adaptation of the Spanish-language film "Open Your Eyes," which also starred Cruz.

Jim Carrey heads back in time in "The Majestic" (Warner Bros./Castle Rock, December 21) "I play a writer during the blacklist era who loses his memory and ends up in a town where they think he's this war hero," says Carrey. "And suddenly he starts to live the life of this hero, and he starts to understand what it is to be a hero and then he's faced with having to go back when he finds out who he is."

That concept of time travel is popular this season. Hilary Swank challenges Marie Antoinette in "The Affair of the Necklace" (Warner Bros., November 30) while Martin Lawrence heads to the Middle Ages in "Black Knight" (Twentieth Century Fox, November 21) and Hugh Jackman's 19th-century duke ends up in 21st-century Manhattan in love with Meg Ryan in "Kate & Leopold" (Miramax, December 21)

Like Tim Allen in "Joe Somebody" (Twentieth Century Fox, December 21) whose everyman turns into a unexpected hero, Hollywood seems to have a cinematic gift for everybody this season, so put aside that to-do list and go buy a ticket and some popcorn and enjoy Hollywood's visual feast.