In
The L.A Times, Steven Zeitchik examines the box-office success of films aimed primarily at children and the adults who take them to the cinema.
Almost every big hit among the 2010 releases has been a movie whose primary, if not overwhelming, audience is children 12 and under -- "How to Train Your Dragon," "Shrek Forever After," "Alice in Wonderland." Ditto for the year's biggest sleeper, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid."
Given that many movies aimed at an older audience have failed at the box office, Zeitchik wonders if this will all have a significant impact on the movies that big studios choose to make.
There's no way of knowing how panicky studio executives will react to all this. But if past experience is any indication, they tend to overcompensate in the direction the wind is blowing. So family films that are in development will get pushed up the pipeline; movies aimed at everyone else get pushed back. And before you know it (usually in two or three years, when the winds may have changed direction again), we could see a multiplex full of movies the whole family can enjoy.
Anyone who thinks Burton's Alice in Wonderland is for kids is an idiot.
ReplyDeleteIt would be more interesting (and more useful) to graph the success of a movie against the number of writers.
I spent over a year crafting, with the producers' approval, an adaptation of a sequel to a children's classic; designing it as a family film that would appeal to a wide age range, including accompanying adults. At the last minute BBC Films decided to dumb down my script to the level of a six year-old audience and to have somebody else rewrite it.
ReplyDelete