Demographics, as Mark Steyn likes to say, are everything — or very nearly everything, at any rate. Nine years ago, I wrote an article on the teensploitation craze for Books & Culture that began by looking even further back to a prediction that appeared to have come true at the time that I was writing that article:
There was a time, not too long ago, when conservative pundits liked to argue that family-friendly movies were, from the point of view of the major Hollywood studios, a safer financial bet. Restricted movies played to narrower, restricted audiences, while G-rated movies were free to play to as wide an audience as the market could al low. A number of hugely successful films in the early 1990s—such as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin—seemed to prove their point.
But there were voices of caution, too. In 1992, Universal Studios chairman Tom Pollock told Premiere magazine that the movie industry was reaping the benefits of a “baby boomlet,” a natural result of the fact that many baby boomers now had children of their own. Pollock noted further that these children wouldn’t stay young forever: “They’re about to come into their teens, so we’re going to be having a whole raft of coming-of-age movies again. Everybody’s going to lose their virginity again.”
That raft is upon us now. Teen ensemble films are fairly cheap to make, and studios can usually count on at least getting their money back; in some cases, they can reap substantial profits. Clueless and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet were decent-sized hits, but they didn’t prepare Hollywood for the success of Scream, a postmodern high-school slasher flick that opened three years ago and, to everyone’s surprise, quietly amassed a domestic box-office gross of just over $100 million. . . .
I was reminded of that article tonight while reading this paragraph from Mark Harris’s recent article on so-called “niche” audiences:
Here’s a genuinely surprising piece of news about the summer of 2008: In a season expressly designed to appeal to the hordes of kids who are out of school, two of the kiddiest movies so far, Speed Racer and Prince Caspian, have fizzled. And next summer, and for several summers to come, there’ll be fewer kids going to the movies, because there’ll be fewer kids, period. Apparently (this is the U.S. Census talking), we had a mini-baby boom between about 1981 and 1995. And then came a dip — a substantial dip — in the kid population. In other words, that mammoth group of youngsters that has reliably fueled movie grosses for almost 15 years is now looking less kidlike: They’re between 13 and 27. And getting older. And looking for movies that appeal to them. And they’re really not going to like being called a niche.
As Mark Steyn also likes to say, stability is an illusion and there is no such thing as the status quo; things are always moving in some direction or other. Could be interesting times ahead.
(Hat tip to Joe Leydon for the Mark Harris “money quote”.)
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