With the music industry facing declining record sales and complaints by performers about record company business tactics, it makes sense for singers to try other avenues of income. ''I'll always have my singing with Destiny's Child to fall back on,'' said Beyoncé Knowles, one-third of the Grammy-winning trio, whose acting debut in MTV's hip-hop version of ''Carmen'' led to her playing Foxxy Cleopatra, the female lead in the new ''Austin Powers'' movie, due for release this summer and featuring a cameo appearance by Ms. Still, few singers are quitting their day jobs.
GOOD LUCK BAND STARS WERE FALLING MOVIE
Put another way, some pop stars seem willing to bet that a movie career may have longer legs than a music one. Behind the bland, too-good-to-be-true characters delivered in many teen-idol movies lies the calculation that it is wise to have a backup career if and when the music dies. While some of those careers lasted decades, many of today's music stars are a flash in the pan, with one or two hit albums if they are lucky, followed by obscurity and hand-wringing. (Since their release dates, ''Queen of the Damned'' has made a total of $24 million at the domestic box office ''A Walk to Remember,'' $39.3 million and ''Crossroads,'' $31.2 million.)
The bellwether of financial success is Whitney Houston, whose 1992 film ''The Bodyguard'' grossed $122 million domestically, a pinnacle no other singer has come close to attaining. And Cher, who won fame alongside Sonny Bono and went on to a solo career, evolved into a respected actress, earning an Academy Award for ''Moonstruck'' in 1988. Barbra Streisand went from nightclubs and Broadway to Hollywood, gaining iconic status. In the 1960's the Beatles' classic ''A Hard Day's Night'' paved the way for music videos and remains vibrant still. Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and Elvis Presley all had movie careers, even if critics did not always think much of them.
Highly publicized debacles like ''Glitter'' - one critic described it as a ''crime against cinema'' - do not appear to have scared off potential crossover artists, who, in any event, have a long tradition to draw on.
And ''A Walk to Remember,'' with the 18-year-old pop singer Mandy Moore in the lead, has accumulated decent but not spectacular sums in the month since it opened. 22, although loyal fans of Aaliyah, the young singer who died last August in a plane crash in the Bahamas propelled it to a first-place finish in that weekend's box-office listings. ''Just because you're very successful in one arena doesn't mean you'll be successful in another,'' said Ann Carli, the producer of the light-as-air Britney Spears confection ''Crossroads,'' which brought in $17 million on its opening weekend in mid-February - a second-place finish behind the hospital drama ''John Q'' and ahead of Disney's ''Return to Never Land'' - but has since had a steep falloff in attendance.Īnother diva film, ''Queen of the Damned,'' was panned when it was released on Feb. But as Mariah Carey's disastrous experience with ''Glitter'' proved last year, the road to Hollywood is littered with the carcasses of unwatched pop-star movies. The last few weeks have seen the release of three feature films with young divas as leading ladies, with more to come, all produced in the expectation that the pictures will be borne aloft by the stars' built-in audiences. For pop singers accustomed to churning out music videos, acting in movies may not seem like much of a stretch.
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