“You took my kid, motherf*cker, and you’re going to pay”

That’s the enlightened position of one “top studio exec” in this Hollywood Reporter article on why Taken did over $200M at the box office and other smart adult movies like State of Play won’t come near that mark. Yes, you’re right. Here we go again, angsting over adult moviegoers:

Pricey, star-driven thrillers and dramas will struggle for profitability as the recession intensifies a trend toward youth-dominated openings.

That’s the consensus after the weekend’s soft opening for Universal’s Russell Crowe starrer, the latest in a series of misfires by adult-oriented releases. Investigative-journo thriller “State of Play” rung up just $14.1 million over its first frame, meaning the Americanized adaptation of a British miniseries must overperform dramatically overseas for the $60 million production to break even.

The pic’s travails reflect this rude awakening in Hollywood: Older demos may be resisting the recent enthusiasm for moviegoing. Certainly it’s been months since anything has caught fire at the arthouses.

It’s not just that we adults are avoiding movies, we’re also damn hard to reach per marketing:

“Adults are a harder audience to motivate, and the problem with some adult movies is compounded by their not being high-concept films that you can boil down to 30-second spots,” a top studio exec said. “With ‘Taken,’ it was, ‘You took my kid, motherfucker, and you’re going to pay.’ “

Let me say, as crass as this exec is, I get their point. I call it “emotional resonance” and I preach it all the time in the classroom. A writer has to create characters and a plot set-up that generates (A) identification with the main characters, especially the Protagonist, (B) sympathy or at the very least empathy with the characters, and © engagement with what’s at stake in the plot. With Taken, the audience’s resonance is personal:

“The success of ‘Taken’ has a lot to do with the audience rooting so hard for Liam Neeson to find his daughter in the picture,” Fox distribution president Bruce Snyder said. “The audience involvement is great. That personal involvement doesn’t happen often with these kind of movies. It’s more common in the younger movies, but that emotional note is important to hit.”

By this measure, a movie like All the President’s Men, the real life story of two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), would likely not work in today’s cultural environment because the reporters’ involvement isn’t with a person, it’s with concepts: You know, little things like democracy and the Constitution.

Compare to the new Star Trek. The Protagonist, young James Kirk (Chris Pine), discovers that his father, a Star Fleet captain for twelve minutes, was a hero. “He saved eight hundred lives… including yours,” Kirk is told by Capt. Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood). “I dare you to do better,” Pike says. There you go. (A) Guilt over his father’s death. (B) The shadow of his father’s heroism. © The challenge to “do better.” All that is personal — but do we really need to risk laying it on so thick?

Hwood’s current CW suggests that movies can’t just have emotional resonance, that connection has to be deeply personal. In other words, something like “You took my kid, mofo, and you’re gonna pay.” Agree or disagree?

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