WB's 'Battlefield' manages orbit at Sci Fi

Cabler gets Travolta bomb for $2 mil

By JOHN DEMPSEY

NEW YORK -- Eric Frankel, recently promoted to president of domestic-cable distribution for Warner Bros., was puffing out his chest with pride last week after harvesting $40 million in license fees from CBS and TBS/TNT for a group of theatrical movies led by the Sandra Bullock hit "Miss Congeniality."

But that deal was easy compared to the triumph of salesmanship Frankel pulled off a few months ago in unloading the Warner Bros. turkey "Battlefield Earth," starring John Travolta, to the Sci Fi Channel for a small but satisfying license fee of $2 million.

Sci Fi and Warners have kept the deal quiet, as the cabler felt sheepish about the buy, and WB didn't want to rub Sci Fi's nose in it.

"Earth" became notorious when Warner Bros. released it last year to almost universal pans. The critics treated it as a vanity production of Travolta, a practicing scientologist, who had always wanted to make a movie of the novel "Battlefield Earth" because the author is the late L. Ron Hubbard, founder of scientology.

Buoyed by Travolta's name and an ad campaign stressing the explosions and the futuristic special effects, "Earth" opened in theaters with a not-contemptible $11.5 million. But word of mouth sank it: Six weeks later, the movie had stopped tracking at $21.4 million.

Neither Warner Bros. nor Sci Fi would comment for the record, but Sci Fi has locked in a three-year license term to "Battlefield Earth," starting in December 2002. Because there were no other offers for the movie, Sci Fi got it at a bargain rate of only about 10% of domestic box-office gross instead of the typical 14%-15%.

One wag said Warner Bros. might have attracted an offer from Comedy Central if the network were still running "Mystery Science 3000," whose stock in trade was screening movies while three characters -- a scientist and two robots, the backs of their heads visible at the bottom of the screen -- delivered a constant stream of sarcastic remarks, skewering a movie that deserved to be skewered.