DISNEY SAILING TOWARD HAPPY ENDING `PIRATES' BUOYS AS `WATER' SINKS AT WARNER BROS.

Byline: GREG HERNANDEZ Staff Writer

The summer 2006 box office story lines for Disney and Warner Bros. could not possibly have more disparate scripts.

Disney, after suffering through a dismal summer of 2005, is enjoying the kind of season that will long be remembered. ``Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'' is at $321.9 million after just 17 record-setting days and is on its way to becoming the studio's highest-grossing film ever. Adding handsomely to that good fortune is the Pixar Animation movie ``Cars,'' poised to become the summer's second-biggest hit with a take so far of $229.5 million.

But Warner Bros., a strong runner-up to summer 2005 box office champ 20th Century Fox, hit the wall with a stunningly low $18 million opening for M. Night Shyamalan's latest suspense-thriller ``Lady in the Water.''

This follows the dismal performance of its disaster flick ``Poseidon'' ($60.4 million), so-so numbers for the Keannu Reeves-Sandra Bullock romance ``The Lake House'' ($50.6 million) and solid but not spectacular grosses for the costly ``Superman Returns'' ($178.3 million).

``A studio can have a bad year or two years and can go back and lead in market share,'' observed box office analyst Robert Bucksbaum, president of Reel Source Inc. ``It's all peaks and valleys, hitting home runs or getting by with singles until you can hit a home run. All it takes is one or two movies to get you back on track.''

Before the start of the summer season in early May, now first-place Disney was the fifth-place studio with just one solid hit under its belt: the dog rescue story ``Eight Below,'' which took in a solid $81.6 million domestically. But doing just so-so was ``The Shaggy Dog'' ($61.1 million) and ``Glory Road'' ($42.6 million) while ``Stick It,'' ``Annapolis,'' ``The Wild'' and ``Goal! The Dream Begins'' all failed to make much of a box office impact.

``Disney has played the summer smart by going back to Pixar and `Pirates,' and concentrated on what people love their brand for,'' said Brandon Gray, president of Box Office Mojo.

``Pirates,'' now expected to easily surpass the $400 million mark domestically, has also taken in an additional $217 million internationally.

The international numbers for ``Superman'' ($110 million to date) have taken some of the pressure off domestic box office having to make up for the film's hefty $250 million-plus production budget.

``On the one hand, `Superman' is doing about as well as one can expect a franchise resurrection to do,'' Gray said. ``But when you have this tremendous budget, you have the expectations that go with that kind of budget.''

Fortunately for Warner Bros., ``Water'' had a far more modest budget of $55 million. With such a slow start, the film is not a shoo-in to make even that amount at the domestic box office.

This is a stunning fall from box office grace for Shyamalan, who had an unbroken string of hits starting with ``The Sixth Sense'' followed by ``Unbreakable'' and ``Signs.'' On reputation alone, Shyamalan's summer 2004 film ``The Village'' overcame dismal reviews to gross more than $100 million.

But ``Village'' was so reviled that it set the stage for ``Water'' to sink two summers later.

``Even though it does have the horror element, it is an unusual movie with no stars or no overt selling point besides the name of the director and the movie's creepy atmosphere,'' Gray said. ``It's a hard movie to sell, especially post-`The Village,' which did a lot of damage to the M. Night Shyamalan brand.''

Shyamalan very publicly clashed with Disney's former production head Nina Jacobson about the story line for ``Water,'' which resulted in the filmmaker taking the movie to Warners. The parting with Disney is covered in the new book ``The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale.''

Gray thinks Shyamalan and his film may have suffered from overexposure.

``He's a star director and any time the mystery is taken away from a star, it's not beneficial,'' he said. ``I think there was no way this picture was going to reach Shyamalan's previous heights.''

But Bucksbaum said Warners will rebound just as Disney has.

``Warner Bros. is resilient,'' he said. ``They aren't going anywhere. You just have to hang in there and realize you aren't going to hit a home run every time.''

For Disney, the current box office success is bittersweet with last week's announcement that the studio is eliminating 560 jobs, evenly split between domestic and international operations.

Pink slips are expected to be handed out this week.

greg.hernandez(at)dailynews.com

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