BIG BOX OFFICE BUST MEANS STUDIO HEADS ROLL

Chris Ayres in Los Angeles

If this year’s Hollywood box office sales could be turned into a movie, they would fit only one genre: horror.

Like zombies who keep getting up even after they’ve been machine-gunned a hundred times, the turkeys of 2009 just won’t stop coming: Land of the Lost, Gamer, Surrogates, Funny People, Love Happens, The Taking of Pelham . . .

Never heard of them? Well, neither has anyone else, even though these unseasonal flops were led by some of Hollywood’s biggest names — including Bruce Willis, Jennifer Aniston, and Will Ferrell — and cost an astonishing $400 million in total to make.

It is now clear that only a fraction of this epic outlay will be recouped at a time when DVD sales are vanishing (they’re down by 13.5 per cent so far this year, after an 9 per cent drop last year). Inevitably, heads are beginning to roll as a result.

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This week Walt Disney and Universal Pictures announced drastic changes in their executive line-ups, with the veteran Disney studio chief Dick Cook — whose moment of glory was the blockbuster movie franchise Pirates of the Caribbean — being replaced by his younger rival Rich Ross, and Universal’s joint chairmen Marc Shmuger and David Linde standing down to make way for the studio’s marketing and production heads.

“There’s been more change in the last 18 months than in the preceding 18 years,” Mark Gill, head of the Film Department, a movie financing company, commented in the Los Angeles Times.

Other movie moguls who have also lost their once-safe jobs over recent months include John Lesher at Paramount Pictures and Harry Sloan at MGM. The latter’s remake of Fame bombed, and the studio is teetering under the weight of $3.7 billion debt.

Many believe such an industry-wide shake-up is long overdue in an age in which a $20 million-per-picture A-lister can no longer guarantee that a film will make money, and merchandising and brand tie-ins must be sought to replace cash from lost Wall Street loans and DVD revenues.

While fees from online sales are growing, analysts say that they are not nearly enough to make up for the shortfalls in other areas, which include overseas takings — down sharply because of the strong dollar.

As always, they say, the trick is to make a cheap movie that becomes a cult hit, such as Zombieland, a low-budget comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson. The film opened last weekend and it has already recouped the entire production budget.

Movie veterans caution that such hits are often a result of luck as much as judgment. And although ticket-inflation is likely to result in overall US box office revenues rising again this year — masking the industry’s deeper problems — behind the scenes there is panic, especially at Hollywood’s two worst-performing studios, Disney and Universal.

Disney is hoping that Rich Ross, who made a name for himself with such mega-franchises as Hannah Montana and High School Musical, can apply the same commercial magic to the company’s slate of up-and-coming movies. He will also be responsible for overseeing its recent $4 billion acquisition of Marvel Entertainment, the comic book publisher.

Universal’s parent company, General Electric, is thought to be trying to sell the studio along with the NBC television network. Comcast, a cable company, is the most likely buyer.

Whoever takes ownership will have to hope that it does not produce any more movies like Land of the Lost, a rare big-budget comedy, based on a 1974 television series and starring Will Ferrell. Critics and audiences alike hated it, and even though it boasted a $100 million budget, it recouped only $7 million on its opening day. The film’s total worldwide takings currently stand at barely two thirds of what it cost to make.