I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’re still in a period of big studio movie making where betting tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on a wholly original concept without a built in audience is just not worth the risk involved.

In a MPAA-issued Summer Movie newsletter [PDF] released in 2006, the following facts are given about the basic finances of major motion pictures, and remember, these are pre-recession dollars:

- The major motion picture studios invest an average of $96.2 million to make and market a movie.

- On average, studios spend $60 million for production fees, employee salaries, capitalized interest and overhead.

- Marketing, on average, costs $36.2 million per movie. That includes $3.8 million for film copies and $32.36 million for advertising in newspapers and magazines and on TV and the Internet.

- Only one out of every 10 films recovers its investment from domestic showings.

- Six out of 10 movies never recoup the original investment.

Already, just making a summer blockbuster is a risky investment, so the greater commercial Hollywood has entered a decade where each summer is punctuated by huge movies that are sequels, prequels or reboots of franchises that have a built in audience or schlock marketed as something familiar, even if it’s not.

Take, for instance, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which I’ve heard good things about, but didn’t see because I knew it was A Christmas Carol meets My Best Friend’s Wedding. However, the more I hear about the performances in this movie and how well the premise was handled, I’m starting to understand that the promotional material I ended up seeing for the Matthew McConaughey flick was designed so I could recognize the premise and take my girlfriend to it, feeling comfortable.

The jokes on them, or me, for getting dumped awhile ago.

Point being, the millions of dollars spent on marketing a film is often spent making you think that you’ve seen something like the film before, or explaining to outsiders of the established franchise why this installment was made more for them. Marketers want you to settle into a theater, after buying your refreshment, feeling comfortable about what you’re going to see.

Take JJ Abrams’ Star Trek this weekend: a new action-adventure installment of a franchise that has had problems drawing in non-Trekkers, women and international audiences. For the franchise to survive, and to recoup the studio’s investment, you have to bring in the audiences who previously thought they wouldn’t see a Star Trek movie.

How do you do it? Cast younger actors and glitz it up with more action and explosions.

Even then, there’s no point in making a Star Trek movie if the Star Trek fans don’t show up. Here lies the dilemma where most films would just rely on marketing. Star Trek fans are gonna show up for something with the characters they know and non-stop, cross-platform marketing will bring in the newbies who want to see something different. The catch is that the die-hard franchise fans have certain things they want honored and that’s at odds with the casual movie-goer.

Example: Fans of Wolverine would have preferred (among a lot of other things) if Weapon XI wasn’t Deadpool, but the movie is so chock full of other mutants to try and please the fans that introducing another non-character mutant might have confused the franchise newbies who were just there to see Hugh Jackman and shirtless, white-painted Ryan Reynolds.

It looks like Hollywood is going to try and bring in both audiences under the same banner this summer using a theme that is one of my favorite as a geek: Time Travel.

This weekend’s Star Trek takes us back in time and establishes Leonard Nemoy as “Spock Prime” in this alternate timeline where the same people exist, but events are different. In an interview with Mr. Beaks from AICN, screenwriters Roberto Orci And Alex Kurtzman discuss how alternate timelines can be liberating in this type of film:

Beaks: You guys aren’t going to give me a real answer on this, but I’m going to ask anyway. Have you considered working Khan into a subsequent film?

Kurtzman: Who?

Orci: The honest answer is if you’re a TREK fan, there’s no way Khan isn’t at the top of the list of things you want to play with, right?

Beaks: Right.

Orci: It’ll just be whether or not it’s the right thing to do.

Beaks: That’s another iconic character with a very distinctive voice. How would you write Khan if you were to take that character on?

Kurtzman: The whole reason we came to this idea of an alternative time line was so that everyone could feel that canon was being respected while giving us freedom to have the future be unwritten. I think that leaves you as much or as little room for interpretation as you’d like in terms of some of the key characters.

Orci: I think if this works, it’ll be because it sometimes does what would’ve happened in the other timeline, and it sometimes doesn’t. It’s sort of a harmony - and finding that right balance will the be key if we do it.

After Star Trek bows in this weekend and audiences get a chance to wrap their fan/non-fan heads around the idea of divergent and parallel timelines, we get smacked in the face with Terminator Salvation, which will most likely end with the idea that time travel is on the forefront of Skynet’s attempts to kill John Connor, and – assuming as we are that Bale’s Connor lives – John himself might still be concerned with sending his father, a teenaged Kyle Reese back in time.

Or, if you read yesterday’s post about a possible Terminator 5 synopsis, we’ll have more discussion to do about time travel as a story-telling device.

[ED: I didn’t know where else to put this little fact, but it would be negligent not to mention I’m avoiding Lost. I want to watch the whole series in one burst, but I can’t avoid that the show is now jumping through time. I imagine it would be beneficial to this post to know what the series was attempting, but I want to enjoy the full work when it gets close to ending.]

These actual time travel/alternate dimension theories are pretty complex, but not above the average movie goer. If you doubt me, I suggest you read THIS POST on OverThinkingIt.com called “How Time Travel Works (and doesn’t) in Back To The Future.”

It just seems like we’re teetering on the edge of involving sci-fi science in our everyday reboots, even though the decision is made from more of a marketing standpoint. Then again, the convenience of the Superhero Genre being based both on ancient, Joseph Campbell-studied mythology AND having decades of backstory on the printed comics page (and the built in audiences to go along with it) has been bringing us a constant flow of superhero films for almost a decade.

Who’s to say time travel and tapestry timeline theory aren’t going to be the “get out of canonical jail free” card for the next wave of summer blow-em-ups.