OFF-CENTERPIECE : MOVIES : A Land Between Movieland and Cableland--VideoGameland
“The Addams Family” and “Hook” are headed for the small screens in your homes sooner than you think. But they won’t be the splashy motion pictures opening in theaters in the next few weeks.
The video game versions of the movies are the latest in the recent crop of video games based on feature films. What’s different about the “Addams Family” and “Hook” games, however, is that they’re timed to arrive in the marketplace just after the movies open.
The growth of the video game market has not been overlooked by the Hollywood studios, which are facing declining movie theater attendance and the need to offset ever-increasing production costs with new ways to promote their product and boost income. The money from the sale of video game rights to a game maker isn’t huge by Hollywood standards, but benefits come in other forms.
Both games will generally follow the plot lines of their respective movies. In the “Addams” video game, the family is evicted from their spooky mansion and the character of Gomez (played in the Paramount movie by Raul Julia) must search for his missing family members. The “Hook” game, based on Steven Spielberg’s huge-budget fantasy of the “Peter Pan” story, follows a grown-up Peter as he goes back to Never Never Land to rescue his old pals.
“The Addams Family” video game from Ocean of America Inc. will be in stores by mid-December, about one month after the movie opens. “Hook,” from Sony Image Soft Inc., will be out by mid-January. Both will be in the Nintendo format and in the $30 range.
“Movies and video games are an American pastime and now we’re getting the opportunity to marry the two,” said Bill White, director of advertising for Nintendo of America. Nintendo estimates there are 32 million homes in the U.S. with video game equipment, and those customers spent about $2.4 billion on video software in 1990--or about half the roughly $5 billion spent by moviegoers at the nation’s box offices in the same year.
“The games that are based on movies bring a currency and awareness to the movie, which will accelerate the word of mouth and, in turn, drive ticket sales,” White says. “On the other side, the film’s promotion budget will generate an interest selling the game.”
The growing sense of “synergy”-- of one product helping another--has not been lost on the entertainment corporations. Which is one major reason why so many of the major Hollywood studios are now divisions within conglomerate-size corporations that also have music, publishing and video units.
So when a movie opens these days, it doesn’t just open. It arrives --often complete with soundtrack songs, music videos, novelizations, toys, fast-food outlet tie-ins, video games and whatever else Hollywood can dream up.
The improved coordination of movies and video games has come about with the recognition of the video game market potential by Hollywood. Ocean of America President Ray Musci says his company, which has developed video games of such films as “Top Gun” and “Batman,” began more than a year ago to work with Orion Pictures on “The Addams Family” (before the movie was sold to Paramount).
“Making video games is a creative process much like the making of a film,” Musci says, noting it takes nine months to a year to produce a game. “The dollars committed to rights and research and development is in the millions. Then the costs for marketing and production costs can be in excess of a million.”
Musci says that the “real risks” come with video games based on movies that have been untested at the box-office. “Once a film is opened and does well, like ‘Batman,’ it takes the risk out of it, because you have a very identifiable subject to sell.”
That wasn’t the lucky situation however, for the video game of “The Rocketeer” that is already on the market or “Hudson Hawk,” which has a video due soon--both despite the fact that the movies did very poorly at the box office.
Sony Image Soft Inc., on the other hand, had an inside track on securing the rights to “Hook” since the movie’s distributor is TriStar Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp.
“Because we’re a sister company, we’ve been able to work with Spielberg and TriStar every step of the way,” says Sony Image director of communications Peter Dille. “We’ve had access to the script, so when our developers see an action scene, they can turn around and recreate it for the game.”
Not every video game, however, comes out in a timely way. Only now is the 1977 film “Star Wars” arriving in video format. Lucasfilm Games and JVC have jointly produced the game that will hit the marketplace by mid-December; “The Empire Strikes Back” game will be released in the spring. “There’s still a great recognizability of the characters and the name,” says Lucasfilm Games spokeswoman Susan Seserman. “A whole new generation has seen it on TV and as a home-video rental.”
But they’re not taking any chances. In a reversal of the rule that the movie helps promote the video game, Seserman says, “Star Wars” will go back into movie theaters briefly in key markets during December and January (it will be shown once a day, at 9 a.m., at the Crest Theater in Westwood from Dec. 21-26) in an effort to promote the video game.
