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Author
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Topic: NY Times article about the rising 'clout' of women at the boxoffice
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 03-23-2015 07:35 PM
Speaking as a guy who is growing weary of repetitive superhero movies (and R-rated raunch fests) this is kind of a welcome trend....
At the Box Office, It’s No Longer a Man’s World
By BROOKS BARNES
MARCH 22, 2015
LOS ANGELES — Heading into the all-important summer moviegoing season, two converging box-office trends are startling studios: Women are driving ticket sales to a degree rarely, if ever, seen before, while young men — long Hollywood’s most coveted audience — are relatively AWOL.
With the release of “The Divergent Series: Insurgent” over the weekend, women have delivered the three biggest live-action openings of the year. The audience for “Insurgent,” which took in an estimated $54 million from Friday to Sunday, was 60 percent female. The opening-weekend crowd for “Fifty Shades of Grey” was 67 percent female, and women made up 66 percent of the audience for “Cinderella.”
It would be easier to dismiss those percentages as a fluke — three big female-oriented movies just happened to arrive in proximity — if a parade of movies aimed at young men had not bombed over the same period. Among the carnage: “Jupiter Ascending,” “Seventh Son,” “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” “Chappie” and, over the weekend, Sean Penn’s “The Gunman.”
The shift has been noticeable enough to prompt movie executives and producers to ruminate about the causes and consider whether the big film factories should recalibrate their assembly lines. Counting on the stability of young men, studios have nearly 30 superhero movies on the way by the end of 2015, each costing well over $100 million to make. But young men are more easily distracted by other forms of entertainment, and women may now be the more reliable opening-weekend audience.
“You can never put your finger on it entirely, but you have to ask the questions,” said Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros. “Is this just the cyclical nature of the movie business? Or does it point to a more serious shift in habits?”
The uncertainty comes as Hollywood tries to bounce back from a terrible 2014. Admissions fell 6 percent at North American theaters last year, to 1.27 billion, compared with the previous year; ticket sales declined 5 percent, to $10.4 billion. Ticket sales are up about 4 percent so far in 2015, but the high-risk summer months — packed with male-centric movies like “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Terminator: Genisys” and “Ant-Man” — usually set the pace for the year.
Studios awoke to the power of female ticket buyers in 2008, when the “Twilight” action romances became a global phenomenon. Since then, women have turned films like “The Hunger Games,” “Bridesmaids” and “Frozen” into smash hits. But the muscle of women at the multiplex has recently gone “from sporadic to continuous,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst at Rentrak, which tracks box-office data.
Young men used to be Hollywood’s most reliable audience, in part because they tended to be less discriminating than women. “No story? No problem! As long as people got blown up, guys showed up,” Mr. Dergarabedian said.
But studio research executives say young men are the most likely to be lured by alternative activities like video games, sports and YouTube comedy clips. Research indicates that teenage boys in particular do not want to be told when and where they have to consume entertainment, which makes herding them into a movie theater difficult.
In contrast, “teenage girls still seem to want the experience of going to the movies as a group,” said Terry Press, president of CBS Films, which recently hit specialty film pay dirt with “The DUFF,” an $8 million comedy about a high school pecking order that is closing in on $35 million in ticket sales, overwhelmingly because of female moviegoers.
The recent box-office gyrations also expose a flaw in studio strategy, analysts say. At a time when so many movies turn themselves inside out trying to attract everyone (a plan that could be summed up as “wide and shallow” in industry parlance), it is clearly possible to fill a big tent by picking a couple of demographics, in particular underserved ones, and superserving them (“narrow and deep”).
“Cinderella,” for instance, was not aimed at everyone. But by being a perfect version of something narrower — a costume romance aimed at mothers and girls — “Cinderella” has sold a stout $122 million in tickets in the United States and Canada in just two weeks. (“Empire,” aimed initially at often-ignored African-American viewers, offers a corollary example from television.)
“What has been happening at the box office sends a message loud and clear that you don’t need four quadrants to be a massive hit,” said Phil Contrino, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com. In movie jargon, a four-quadrant movie is one that attracts men and women, young and old; Hollywood considers anyone over 25 to be old.
When it comes to the male-female divide, the recent overreliance by studios on visual effects may play a role. The bar for visual effects has been raised so high, experts say, that nothing less than a prolonged smackdown between a raging Hulk and a supersize Iron Man has much hope of turning male heads.
“You used to be able to go to movies and see something that you never saw before — a giant shark, dinosaurs,” said Allison Shearmur, a producer of “Cinderella” and a former senior executive at Lionsgate, Paramount and Universal. “But spectacular visual effects have become routine.”
Ms. Shearmur continued: “So what does that mean? It means that we’ve got to make more movies that have a compelling core story. The audience still comes when the story is strong, when we can laugh or cry or be afraid in a theater together.”
Mr. Fellman of Warner Bros. predicted that boys would return en masse for coming PG-13 event movies like “Furious 7” and “The Avengers: Age of Ultron.”
“Outside of ‘American Sniper,’ which started older and got younger, and ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service,’ there has been a noticeable lack of young men,” Mr. Fellman said. “But a lot of the so-called guy movies recently have been rated R, and you lose a lot of tweeners that way,” he noted.
Warner will add another R-rated comedy to the mix on Friday with “Get Hard,” which has been generating solid interest from men in prerelease surveys.
But the success of Hollywood’s summer box office may well rest with women. Nestled among the superheroes and action movies are an unusually large number of pictures aimed at a female audience, including “Pitch Perfect 2,” an estrogen-heavy musical comedy; “Spy,” an action comedy starring Melissa McCarthy; “Pan,” a splashy adaptation of the Peter Pan story; and the male stripper sequel “Magic Mike XXL.”
“The whole notion of the summer blockbuster has always been built around young men,” Mr. Dergarabedian said. “I think we’re about to see that change. The clout and importance of the female audience has never been bigger.”
New York Times article
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-23-2015 10:36 PM
My girlfriend and I usually save the bigger event type movies for the theater and watch more of the lower budget comedies, romance movies, romantic comedies, etc. at home on Blu-ray, HBO and Netflix.
Regarding the lack of guys at the movie theater, that can be summed up by one big cause: many of the guy-oriented movies have been shit lately. The pendulum may swing the other way if the movies get better.
Now to respond to a couple or so points in the article:
quote: Brooks Barnes
Young men used to be Hollywood’s most reliable audience, in part because they tended to be less discriminating than women. “No story? No problem! As long as people got blown up, guys showed up,” Mr. Dergarabedian said.
That may be true to a certain extent, and it's not just guys either. Audiences can be, but are not always more forgiving of bad movies than movie critics. Unfortunately movie studios have been very guilty of taking audiences for granted, just shoveling out whatever shit they wanted to re-package and re-sell.
Movie critics will at least tell a studio where they went wrong with a bad or uninteresting movie. Audience members don't do that. The customers may, without warning, just suddenly stay away in droves.
So the movie studios really need to be doing a better job of bringing their "A-game" when it comes to expecting people to see a movie at a first run theater.
quote: Brooks Barnes
The recent box-office gyrations also expose a flaw in studio strategy, analysts say. At a time when so many movies turn themselves inside out trying to attract everyone (a plan that could be summed up as “wide and shallow” in industry parlance), it is clearly possible to fill a big tent by picking a couple of demographics, in particular underserved ones, and superserving them (“narrow and deep”).
Movies can be great when they are tailored for a specific audience demographic. Unfortunately Hollywood is defining "wide and shallow" to new extremes on a global scale. They'll tone down witty banter in a James Bond movie because it gets lost in translation in other countries, but everyone understands a car chase and explosions.
quote: Brooks Barnes
“Cinderella,” for instance, was not aimed at everyone. But by being a perfect version of something narrower — a costume romance aimed at mothers and girls — “Cinderella” has sold a stout $122 million in tickets in the United States and Canada in just two weeks. (“Empire,” aimed initially at often-ignored African-American viewers, offers a corollary example from television.)
Black audiences haven't been served very well by Hollywood. Not all black people like Tyler Perry movies. When Hollywood studios will make a movie geared for black audiences it usually conforms to one of a few very tired, worn out templates. One thing black audiences would like to see more often: leading roles in movies normally played by white actors going to black actors. Normal people roles. Roles that don't have anything to do with race relations or other stuff that involves bringing up racial stereotypes. That doesn't happen very often.
quote: Brooks Barnes
When it comes to the male-female divide, the recent overreliance by studios on visual effects may play a role. The bar for visual effects has been raised so high, experts say, that nothing less than a prolonged smackdown between a raging Hulk and a supersize Iron Man has much hope of turning male heads.
I think the problem with visual effects is the bar has actually slipped to lower levels. Movie productions aren't trying hard enough to make visual effects realistic enough to fool audiences into thinking they're real. Part of the problem gets back to the woeful lack of effort in many action movies of maintaining the audiences' suspension of disbelief. Combine totally implausible, impossible action scenes with impossible camera angles and what do you get: an audience of movie-goers subconsciously knowing they're watching a glorified cartoon, even if the effect is perfectly rendered.
Compound this problem with tight production deadlines and studios jobbing out lots of work overseas to cut costs. A lot of the best talent in 3D animation has left the movie industry and gone to other markets like game design, defense technology and biotech. Motion picture visual effects companies no longer seem to be defining new standards in quality. Too often they're repeating what has already been done, but doing it cheaper and faster.
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Terry Lynn-Stevens
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1081
From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Dec 2012
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posted 03-23-2015 11:26 PM
quote: Justin Hamaker
I'm actually growing board with the Marvel and Transformers movies because each one is just a variation of a formula of unbeatable good guys fighting indestructible bad guys while destroying everything in sight.
I agree, and there WILL be a time when the Marvel and Transformers movies are no longer as successful as they are now. We are already seeing that with the way Spider-Man 2/Transformers 4 underperformed at the domestic box office.
quote: Justin Hamaker
Jupiter Ascending, Seventh Son, and Hot Tub Time Machine 2
None of these movies have actors who appeal to the under 25 crowd. Neither does Run all Night and Sean Penn certainly does not appeal to the under 25 crowd with The Gunman
quote:
“I think we’re about to see that change. The clout and importance of the female audience has never been bigger.”
I don't think this is true, the studios are just responding to how the industry (demographics) adjusts, Hunger was a monster colossus hit, now the studios are just doing what they always do when they smell money, they try to capitalize on it. Hunger Games book three all of a sudden became a two-part movie, so did Allegiant book. Then they add on 3-D for the final Hunger Games, as well as 3-D for Insurgent. Once Hollywood turns off women, then we will be back to square one. I wonder if the final 50 Shades book will be split into two? I didn't bother with Mockingjay once it was made aware that the movie would be split into two.
50 Shades, Fault in the Stars, Gone Girl, Hunger Games, Divergent, Longest Yard etc were all based on best selling books. That pretty guarantees a very big audience that will watch the movie. There is nothing new with this strategy, it just so happens that the producers saw this trend.
quote: Mike Blakesley
When it comes to the male-female divide, the recent overreliance by studios on visual effects may play a role. The bar for visual effects has been raised so high, experts say, that nothing less than a prolonged smackdown between a raging Hulk and a supersize Iron Man has much hope of turning male heads.
The special effects is not the issue. The studios are trying to hared, every time to make a monster hit or the "the" next franchise. The studios need to go back to the drawing board and try to come up with some original content from good directors that will draw people in.
quote:
“Cinderella,” for instance, was not aimed at everyone. But by being a perfect version of something narrower — a costume romance aimed at mothers and girls — “Cinderella” has sold a stout $122 million in tickets in the United States and Canada in just two weeks.
A four year old boy could of told the author that Cinderella was aimed at mothers and daughter.
quote: Mike Blakesley
But studio research executives say young men are the most likely to be lured by alternative activities like video games, sports and YouTube comedy clips. Research indicates that teenage boys in particular do not want to be told when and where they have to consume entertainment, which makes herding them into a movie theater difficult.
The studios need to work together with the movie theater chains. I am still amazed that the studios and chains have not figured out that marketing the idea of "going to the movies" would be just as important as the "movie title" in particular. Car manufacturers do not only market a car model, they market a lifestyle, same thing with Apple or high end clothing lines. The studios need to re-think how they market to audiences, advertising just the movie is not enough IMO.
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Justin Hamaker
Film God
Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004
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posted 03-24-2015 12:01 AM
quote: Terry Lynn-Stevens
I don't think this is true, the studios are just responding to how the industry (demographics) adjusts, Hunger was a monster colossus hit, now the studios are just doing what they always do when they smell money, they try to capitalize on it.
It's not just Hunger Games. And it's not just Twilight or the Divergent series. Or Fifty Shades or The Fault in our Stars. It's also Sex and the City, and Magic Mike. It's Bridesmaids, and The Heat, and Tammy.
Over the last 7-8 years we have seen many more female centric movies become big hits at the box office. Sure, many are based on popular books. But books have always been a source for popular movies. I think it has more to do with Hollywood realizing that movies made for women can do good business. As we've seen in a number of cases, these films tend to open big and fall fast. But does it really matter once the money is in the bank.
When it comes to splitting the final book, you really have to look at Harry Potter as the start to that phenomenon. And The Hobbit has taken it to obscene levels.
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