“Audiences Are Finding Diversity at Summer Movies”

A conversation between NYT film critics A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis about some counterprogramming surprises at the box office this summer:

DARGIS: Each summer a few films emerge as counterprogramming favorites, the antiblockbusters; last year two such titles were “Midnight in Paris” and “The Tree of Life,” and the year before audiences yearning for something other than cartoons and superheroes looked to “The Kids Are All Right” and “Winter’s Bone.” But none of those relatively modestly budgeted movies cracked the summer Top 20. This season, however, four movies in the Top 20 were made for $20 million or under and, it’s also worth noting, were sold to specific audiences: “Moonrise Kingdom” (art house), “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (older boomers), “Madea’s Witness Protection” (African-Americans) and “Magic Mike” (straight women, gay men and anyone with a sense of humor).

As of last weekend the summer’s big three (“The Avengers,” “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Spider-Man”) are also among the best grossers of the year. That’s to be expected, especially given their hard sells and wide releases. What wasn’t expected was that Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” even with a three-week jump, would have made more than movies starring Tom Cruise (“Rock of Ages”) and Adam Sandler (“That’s My Boy”). It’s impossible to know if the success of “Moonrise” and its humbly priced chart-busting brethren are a fluke, a harbinger of increasing diversity (subject, genre, audience demographic) or a sign of blockbuster fatigue. It would be nice to think that audiences have started to weary of the same quips, big bangs and long underwear avengers.

— —

SCOTT: You note that “Magic Mike” owes much of its box office potency to its popularity with women. As you suggested in your review it’s a “woman’s picture” in two potentially radical ways. It caters to the kind of visual pleasure — the delight in ogling beautiful bodies in motion — that film theorists have long associated with the male gaze. And it tells what would have been, in an earlier era, the story of a woman, a good-hearted, hard-working striver selling sex appeal, pursuing dreams and looking for true love in difficult circumstances. The stuff of classic melodrama but with a hard-bodied hero in place of the softhearted heroine.

Last summer the power of the female audience — and also perhaps the renewed willingness of male moviegoers to seek out stories about women — was demonstrated by the success of “Bridesmaids” and “The Help.” This year, after the springtime domination of “The Hunger Games,” another archer-girl movie, Pixar’s “Brave,” featuring the company’s first female protagonist after 10 boy-centric features, has quietly racked up more than $220 million at the domestic box office. Independent film also has a scrappy young heroine, thanks to Mr. Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” There have often been one or two such hits in years past, most of them starring Meryl Streep: “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Mamma Mia!” and “Julie & Julia.” (Her latest, “Hope Springs,” opened Wednesday.). But something feels different about this year, and it may just be that such movies feel less anomalous, less like out-riders in a male-dominated entertainment universe. The ground may have shifted a little.

Four out of the top 20 summer movies are ‘alternative’ fare. Moonrise Kingdom outgrosses Tom Cruise and Adam Sandler. Magic Mike has generated $111M in its run, an astonishing figure especially in light of its $7M production budget.

Here’s one takeaway for screenwriters: Know your target audience! The cumulative success of Moonrise Kingdom, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Madea’s Witness Protection and Magic Mike, lies in part due to the fact they found audience. Plus the studios had a simpler job in terms of marketing, zeroing in on the core group of potential moviegoers. So when you sort through your story concepts to write as a spec script, put on your producer’s hat and ask: Who is the target audience for this movie?

What messages can we glean from this summer’s box office?

For more of the NYT article, go here.