“‘Chick flicks’ are really starting to click”
From Rachael Abramowitz in the LA Times (2/14/09):
Last year kicked off with the wildly successful “ Sex and the City: The Movie” followed by “Mamma Mia!” in the summer and “Twilight” in the fall. The trend continued this year with “He’s Just Not That Into You,” last weekend’s №1 movie, followed by this weekend’s new female-skewing offering, “Confessions of a Shopaholic.” If one includes tween girls phenomena like the “ Hannah Montana” concert movie or “ High School Musical 3,” it’s safe to declare that movie studios ignore women at their own peril.
Slowly but surely, the studios seem to be realizing that the much-derided “chick flick” is in fact where the action is these days.
Easy to chalk up to typical ebb-and-flow of the box office, but what about this point:
“The movie industry has distinctly underestimated the female audience and their box-office clout for a long time,” said box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “I’ve seen a shift where you have a lot of guys, teen boys, even twentysomethings are playing video games, staying home. Now movies that have innate appeal to women are paying off. Finally Hollywood has cracked the code of what is appealing to women.”
Is that it? Young males forsaking movies for video games? True, sales of video games in the U.S. topped $17.9 billion in 2007, compared to $9 billion in movie box office. But is the rather startling jump in box office revenues in 2009 primarily due to women?
A sure sign that the genre has embedded itself deep into the consumer psyche is that these types of movies are becoming critic-proof. Here’s what Entertainment Weekly said about “He’s Just Not That Into You”: “You turn romantic sanity into something so sanitized that it starts to make delusion look good.” And many of the reviews for “Sex and the City,” “Mamma Mia!” and “Confessions of a Shopaholic” were similarly snarky.
Who cares? Even though conventional movie wisdom had it that women are more sensitive to reviews than men, female audiences lately have been as devoted to their chick flicks as rabid fanboys. And it’s not just audiences. In a recent interview with The Times, “Mamma Mia!” star Meryl Streep cheerfully referred to the reviewers who decimated the film (which has grossed $585 million worldwide) as “life-hating, life-sucking, desiccated old farts.”
“Life-hating, life-sucking, desiccated old farts.” Hm. Sounds like a description of the current crop of video-game addicted young males in about 40 years. Maybe they should, you know, get out more often… and see a movie.
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