Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2009 November 20 • Friday

There was a thing in the New York Times last month about how women were a "fickle audience" that Hollywood was trying to attract ("Now Starring at the Movies: Famous Dead Women" by Manohla Dargis).

I think that the "fickle audience" part was a pull quote in the hard copy. Let's correct a basic error here: women are actually the least fickle of moviegoers.

American International Pictures, the hugely successful producers of drive-in movies aimed at teenage audiences in the mid-twentieth century, discovered that you could not go wrong with what they called their "Peter Pan Syndrome" strategy:

This is still true. And major Hollywood studios know it and take advantage of it. (Actually, these days they may be focusing more on the 13-year-old male than the 19-year-old male.)

Consider this other article from the New York Times, Sharon Waxman's "Hollywood's Shortage of Female Power" from the April 26, 2007, issue.

She quotes Tom Ortenberg, then president of Lionsgate studio, as saying that "the over-25 female audience" is "dramatically underserved in the marketplace" and, bizarrely, "I don't know why that is". (How could he not know?)

Waxman notes that, "Even though, at first glance, a slate filled with films like Bug and Hostel 2 would seem to be classic male-oriented shriekfests, the reality is that women are avid fans of horror films. (Fifty percent of the “Hostel” audience was female, [Ortenberg] said.)"

Fifty percent, exactly half the audience. See lines c) and d), above, if you still wonder why there are six Saw movies but only one The Devil Wears Prada.

Who's fickle?