What brought adult moviegoers back to the theaters?

So yesterday we had this voice of doom and gloom about the movie industry. Today we have a differing view, the LAT’s Patrick Goldstein, someone whose opinion I respect enormously:

For years, everybody has had a field day taking potshots at the Academy Awards, saying that the Oscar-nominated movies had no mojo with American filmgoers. Conservative critics said liberal Hollywood was woefully out of touch with rank-and-file movie fans. Indie producers said the Academy was picking perfectly good movies, but the films couldn’t compete with the studios’ costly, wall-to-wall marketing of their comic-book franchises.In any case, damning evidence of the disconnect was there for all to see. “The Hurt Locker,” last year’s best picture winner, earned a paltry $17 million in the theaters, the lowest box-office take for a best picture winner in modern history. In 2009, three of the five best picture nominees couldn’t crack the $35 million mark in domestic earnings. In 2007, the best-picture winning “The Departed” was a hit, but none of the four other nominees even made $60 million.

This year is different — very different. There are now 10 best picture nominees. Two of them, “Inception” and “Toy Story 3,” were big summer blockbusters. And if you look at the five best picture favorites — meaning the five films whose filmmakers are also up for the best director Oscar — they have something remarkable in common. The films (“The King’s Speech,” “The Social Network,” “The Fighter,” “True Grit” and “Black Swan”) have all made more than $85 million at the U.S. box office, with three of the five films having passed or on track to pass $100 million.

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Though most of the studios gave up on their specialty divisions in recent years, that might not be such a bad thing; as long as they were around, their parent studios were less likely to be emotionally involved in the kind of risk-taking necessary to make quality-driven adult films.

As I noted in comments yesterday, just two years ago I was lamenting here the supposed death of adult dramas. And now we have the five movies Goldstein notes above which are all good films and found an audience, many of them presumably adults.

You have to figure the studios will have noticed this, right? Moreover none of those movies cost more than I believe $30M (True Grit), so minimal risk and the basis for a strong ROI.

So there you go: Reason for hope!

For more of Goldstein’s article, go here.