How The Sixth Sense's success ended a major Disney studio brand
The Sixth Sense may have been a monster hit, but it inadvertently killed its own studio brand! Here’s how Disney’s mega-hit ended Hollywood Pictures!
Twenty-five years after its debut, much has been written about The Sixth Sense and its impact. One thing overlooked is how almost no one in Hollywood expected this supernatural thriller to make an impact. Indeed, in their annual Summer Movie Preview issue in 1999, Entertainment Weekly didn’t even mention Sense.
Sure, it had a big-name star in Bruce Willis, but it was an odd film from a completely unknown writer/director being released in August, traditionally the dumping ground for bad movies. It debuted to $26.6 million, then the highest August release. Thanks to good reviews, strong word of mouth and, of course, that now-famous twist ending, Sense became the second highest-grossing movie of 1999, $672.8 million worldwide. It earned multiple Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and director, and made M. Night Shyamalan an instant huge name in Hollywood.
Disney had one of their all-time biggest live-action hits and critical acclaim, and one would think this would be a banner success for their Hollywood Pictures brand. Instead, it pretty much ended it.
A short history of Hollywood Pictures
By 1990, Walt Disney Pictures had been split into two main brands. The former handled the family-friendly fare, including animated series, while Touchstone Pictures tackled more adult material. However, CEO MIchael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to increase Disney’s film output without the label of a “Disney film.” So they founded Hollywood Pictures with that cool logo of a sphinx.
Their first film was 1990’s Arachnophobia, which became a modest success. However, throughout its existence, the blunt truth is that Hollywood Pictures was rarely known for success. They scored in 1992 with the surprise mega-smashThe Hand That Rocks the Cradle, followed by sleeper hits Medicine Man and Encino Man. However, the company soon earned a reputation for films that were either disappointments or outright flops like 1993’s disastrous Super Mario Bros.
They did have some victories, such as Tombstone, The Joy Luck Club, and Quiz Show, but were offset by flops like Color of Night or The Puppet Masters. They had developed The Santa Clause only for that to be released under the Walt Disney Pictures banner to become a hit. This led to a change in leadership, with studio chief Ricardo Merstes departing in 1994 and replaced by Michael Lynton.
Ironically, the last films Merstes had greenlit ended up putting Hollywood Pictures into some success. There was the comedy While You Were Sleeping, which established Sandra Bullock as a major leading lady; the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer action-thriller Crimson Tide; and Dangerous Minds, which not only grossed $179 million against a $20 million budget but had a hit soundtrack.
However, that was once more offset by the mega-flop Judge Dredd hurting the brand, followed by the infamously terrible The Scarlet Letter. They did score some critical Oscar-nominated films like Quiz Show, Mr. Holland’s Opus, and Nixon, but that didn’t help their coffers.
The next few years continued this pattern. 1996 had the huge success of The Rock, Spy Hard a sleeper, and Evita a hit earning praise…and flops like Eddie, The Associate, and Jack. The next two years were worse, as with over a dozen films, the only real success was Grosse Pointe Blank, and Disney was clearly feeling the weight of so many bombs combined with the rising costs of production thanks to producers, stars and others wanting larger fees.
So on paper, having The Sixth Sense shattering box office records should have turned the page for Hollywood Pictures. They had what every studio wanted, a monster hit, a critical darling, Oscar-nominated, and also entering the zeitgeist with stuff like “I see dead people.” Except for a deal that ended up ruining the brand.
Why The Sixth Sense didn’t save Hollywood Pictures
As noted at the start, few thought The Sixth Sense was going to succeed, and that included Disney itself. They had bigger films on their 1999 slate to worry about like Tarzan and Inspector Gadget. To his credit, David Vogel, who’d taken over as Hollywood Pictures chief, saw the potential in the script and bought it for $2.2 million before it started a studio bidding war.
Vogel did this on his own with the higher-ups not happy about his rogue move and so they fired him a month before the movie opened. Meanwhile, Willis was only in this to start with because he’d caused a mess with a planned Disney film, Broadway Baller, where he had so many problems that he fired the director and most of the crew. That set off a lawsuit that Willis got out of by signing a three-picture deal for Disney. Sense was the second of them, squeezed between Armageddon and 2000’s The Kid (which became a surprise hit).
So between that and the fact no one knew who Shamalyan was and the low-key story and the Disney brass just didn’t have faith the movie would succeed. That led them to sell production rights to Spyglass Entertainment, who would handle the international distribution, with Disney thus retaining only 12.5% of the movie’s overall grosses.
What this all boils down to is that while Sense took nearly $700 million worldwide, Disney saw less than $90 million of it thanks to the deals they made. Thus, Hollywood Pictures had the “only in Hollywood” story of producing one of the biggest movies of that time and only seeing a fraction of the profits.
With a better deal and cleaning up in the profits of Sense, Hollywood Pictures would have had the money to keep themselves going into the 2000s. Instead, after two more flops of Breakfast of Champions and Mystery, Alaska, the division was slowly and quietly phased out by Disney. It had a brief revival in the mid-2000s for some low-budget genre films, with 2007’s The Invisible being the final movie under the brand.
It’s not like Disney is the first studio to have little faith in a movie that ends up becoming a monster success. Yet it’s still bizarre to see how the story of Hollywood Pictures, with all its ups and downs, ended with what should have been its greatest success instead of becoming the nail in the coffin for the brand.
The Sixth Sense’s place in movie history is set, yet the fact that it turned its own studio into a ghost may be its most bizarre turn ever.