‘The Sum of All Fears’ Opens to the Sum of $31.2 Million

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES After drawing media attention on the entertainment and editorial pages of newspapers and on television for its nuclear terrorist plot line, “The Sum of All Fears” overtook “Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones” as the top film in the country over the weekend. Affleck’s younger version of Clancy’s hero Jack Ryan compares favorably with the previous Ryan outing, “Clear and Present Danger,” which starred Harrison Ford and opened in August 1994 to $20.3 million. Paramount carefully balanced its marketing, playing up the film’s action without avoiding the fact that it deals with the explosion of a nuclear device that has been smuggled into the U.S. Paramount senior executive Rob Friedman says the studio did some fine tuning in the marketing as opening day approached, but that the long screening program elicited so much positive response that his job was providing balance “to demonstrate that we weren’t trying to capitalize on current events and not promoting a different movie from the one they were going to see in theaters.” Present-day world tensions actually made the film “more compelling” to screening audiences, says producer Mace Neufeld, though he regrets that critics “reviewed how audiences would react to the movie rather than the movie itself.” By opening “Sum” right after the Memorial Day holiday, Paramount got a jump on a number of movies aimed at the adult male action crowd. The only other film that premiered was Imagine Entertainment’s ‘70s blaxploitation spoof “Undercover Brother,” which drew amused critical response and a healthy $12.1 million in 2,167 theaters, putting it in fourth place. Holding well in its second weekend is the animated “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” which dropped less than any movie in the Top 10 from the holiday to an estimated $10.7 million.