Early signs of a “Bridesmaids” bump

Fresh on the heels of our week-long analysis of Bridesmaids, this excellent interview in Salon with long-time Hollywood movie producer Lynda Obst (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “Contact” and “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days”). Some excerpts:

Did the success of “Bridesmaids” make a difference to your business?

Yes. It had the biggest impact of any women’s movie that I can remember in my career.

In your whole career, which began with “Flashdance” in 1983?

Yeah. It came at a moment when any movies for women, women’s comedies — forget dramas, there are no dramas for anybody — but women’s comedies, women’s thrillers were going to get put by the wayside forever. Women’s projects were dying everywhere. That’s why the opening of “Bridesmaids” was so critical for every woman in features, why its success was attended with such profound interest by every woman writer, producer and director in town.

The second important factor was that there were no stars in the movie and it wasn’t tracking in advance.

And that matters because it means that it was the material, not a movie star, that drew people to theaters?

Yes. Its success wasn’t automatic. A star opens a movie. Sandra Bullock opens a movie. But there was nobody in this movie who had ever been in a movie before, so it’s the hardest kind of movie to open.

It means that its success was due to the fact that people enjoyed it, and gave it good word of mouth once the movie started screening. Which leads us to the gigantic thing, which was the revelation that women can open a movie, and also, that this [women’s movie] crossed over. Men came. It drew women of all ages and it drew guys and was a major hit. And not just domestically, which is part two of this gigantic thing, because the movie business right now is being driven by international box office.

Comedy doesn’t usually travel well. Movies that travel are movies with very little dialogue, usually dependent on action or family content or big international stars. But “Bridesmaids” did very well internationally. The concept was easy to understand in all languages. It gave us a clue as to what movies will work internationally with women in them. So what we learned is: Broad comedies will sell abroad, even with broads.

What are the immediate effects of this?

There are suddenly projects for women!

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This is not the first time in recent memory that a woman’s movie has done well and studios have failed to notice in any permanent way. “The Devil Wears Prada,” your movie “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” “Sex and the City” have all been big women-driven hits, and yet women’s movies were on the brink of extinction.

Studios have institutionally short memories when it comes to women’s movies. “Sex and the City II” did better internationally than it did domestically, which would have made you think that they would have noticed it. I mean, that’s what inclines Fox to make “Ice Ages”; sequels do so well internationally. But studios don’t seem to generalize by the same rules in women’s movies as they do for other movies.

Every time a woman’s movie does well, it’s a brand-new fact. Every time we rediscover the female audience, it’s astonishing.

What a money quote: “Every time a woman’s movie does well, it’s a brand-new fact.”

While a cynic might be sorely tempted to look at Bridesmaids as a fluke and soon Hollywood will be back to business as — [cough] “man movies” [cough] — usual, this time around it may be different. Everybody is pretty much freaking out about the significant slip in numbers from a core target demo: Males, 30 years old and under. Once the most reliable group of moviegoers, evidently they’re going some place else nowadays. And just as Hollywood has shown an increased interest in adult dramas of late (the astonishing success of The Help will do nothing but fuel that interest), maybe the studios will make a concentrated effort to expand their focus to target women more frequently with the movies they produce.

What do you think? Will Bridesmaids result in a change in the type of movies we see in theaters during the next few years?
 
For more of the Lynda Obst interview — where she also talks about “man movies” — go here.

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