Update: “The Help”
Following up on this post yesterday — “The Help”: Box Office Hit — in which we took a first crack at understanding how this ‘small’ ($25M production budget), period piece adult drama did so well its first week out ($35M B.O.), here is some helpful information via Vulture:
The Apes real challenge was The Help, which three out of four critics had already embraced (despite some contentious racial politics). It’s true that many distribution execs questioned Disney’s strategy of releasing a film geared toward older women (the single-hardest demographic to coax into theaters) in the midst of a highly competitive August melee. But Disney marketing had a secret weapon in women’s book clubs, which had been screening the film nationally for weeks already to build buzz, and which again turned out in force for a special midweek debut. Since Wednesday night, nearly two thirds (60 percent) of its audience was over age 35, and almost three quarters (74 percent) were female. That brought The Help’s total to $35.4 million since Wednesday.
Given the fact its target demo [older women] is a tough group to lure into theaters, The Help is the kind of story that likely only gets produced as a movie because the book was on best selling lists for 100+ weeks, which translates into significant pre-awareness.
Steve Zeitchik at 24 Frames (LAT) adds this take:
For all the cliches about chick flicks, the form has actually taken some interesting turns in recent years. This weekend it took the latest, with the Viola Davis-starring “The Help” telling a story about friendship and loyalty against the backdrop of racism in the 1960s-era South.
Over the past few years, it’s become practically a ritual that a star-driven movie about female-friendship and -empowerment come out every summer, usually in August, and usually based on a book-club favorite. Last year it was “Eat, Pray, Love;” the summer before it was “Julie & Julia.” “The Devil Wears Prada” (which was released over the July 4 weekend) served the genre in 2006.
Whatever these movies’ differences in tone and subject matter, they have several important things in common. They all traffic in themes about female identity. And they’re all solidly, sometimes even wildly, successful.
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The subject of women at the box office has been a hot one this summer, what with “Bridesmaids” and “Bad Teacher” putting women front-and-center in a potty-mouthed comedy. With those films, pundits said that Hollywood was serving or even creating a new audience: women who wanted their movies as bawdy and escapist as men. But with the release of a film that was comedic in a far gentler way, the most recent weekend proved that the old audience hasn’t really gone anywhere.
For those interested, myPDFscripts just uploaded the script for “The Help” which you can download here.