We Lost It at the Movies -- New York Magazine

We Lost It at the Movies

Then, suddenly, right around the Oscars, semi-obscured by that ceremony’s bravado, the movie audience magically surfaced again. We were afraid to admit it at first, like when your bad boyfriend comes home from a binge and you’re afraid he won’t stay.

It was February 24, and a movie opened to $30 million, seemingly out of nowhere to us (it was nurtured on the southern church circuit): Tyler Perry’s—who?—Madea’s Family Reunion. What could we do to cash in? Become Evangelical? This was distressing to a town full of Jews. But then other films came in, like a small wave. Not a tsunami—that would have to wait for Ice Age: The Meltdown to thaw on March 31, when we saw a $68 million opening and we knew all was truly well again and we could keep the farm in Bel Air.

Looking back on it now, we shouldn’t have been quite so despondent. Ignored amid all the dire predictions had been some wayward optimistic signs. Why did Flightplan—a Jodie Foster movie with a vaguely similar premise and hook to those of Stealth (well, they were both about planes), and which came out in a much less-bucolic September slot—open at $25 million and gross $90 million domestic and $223 million worldwide? A fluke? No. Because it was good. And because it wasn’t killed by bad buzz before it opened. Jodie fans, boomers, and young men went to it because the trailer was terrifying (ergo, the marketing worked). And no one heard it was terrible in the death-defying millisecond it takes for word of mouth to travel on the Net these days. (But we hadn’t figured any of that out yet.)

These guys cannot be fooled by marketing anymore. The harder we hype them, the harder we fall.

March 10 brought Failure to Launch, Matthew McConaughey’s male-driven romantic comedy, which opened at $24 million; then V for Vendetta at $26 million, driven by those elusive young boys, who came out in droves to support its first weekend. Then came Spike Lee’s Inside Man, starring Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, and Clive Owen (a baby-boomer cast if ever there was one), which stunned everyone by opening at $29 million. All of these movies held their second weekend, too, and we began to exhale. Others, though, are still not buying it: Kevin Goetz, the terrifically smart head of OTX’s West Coast Media and Entertainment Insights group, foresees a “gradual decline of exhibition as we know it.” But after some debate, he agreed that he was mainly talking about young men.

It’s easy to assume that suddenly we were making movies the audience wanted to see. But we can’t react that quickly. The lesson here is much more about the mistakes we tend to make in the summer with our most expensive movies, when we try the hardest to hit the bull’s-eye with what we consider our key market. Historically, when we want to clean up, we spend zillions and gear the products to teen boys—the most easily distracted audience. Not only are they the ones with the most choices on Friday night, but they also know within a second of our holding a preview anywhere in the world whether a movie stinks or not. These guys cannot be fooled by marketing anymore. The harder we hype them, the harder we fall. By the Net and by BlackBerry transmission, word of mouth rules.

We used to have a weekend to get our money out of a movie like Stealth or Doom. Now we get one night, tops. And that’s not enough to break even, the way it might have been in the good old days before the summer of 2003. That year saw the perplexing, terrifying failures of T3 and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Matrix Whatever. We thought it was about sequels, when it was really about word of mouth.

So we can’t put a bad blockbuster over anymore, as in the golden era of 2002, when The Scorpion King could open at $36 million, or Blade II at $33 million. And we have to kill our singular addiction to teenage boys. We need to diversify the meaning of “our audience.” We have a few audiences. Baby-boomers have a movie habit and an IV hooked up to pop culture (look at Inside Man or The Interpreter). You would have thought that Something’s Gotta Give proved that older women were worth making movies for, but one strike with In Her Shoes and we’re out. Young girls, reliable last year, have been rationalized off the screen (their tastes this year considered to be entirely driven by boys).

And then there’s the need to wean ourselves from other old habits and scapegoats. It’s the movie, stupid. Not the marketing. (Though marketers shouldn’t gloat yet, ’cause they can still kill a good picture.) We all have to go with our gut instincts, give up the fantasy of a formula. It’s harder, but not impossible. Impossible means we have to sell the farm. Hard means we have to work harder. And that’s not a bad thing. I never went to Comic-Con anyway.

Lynda Obst is a producer at Paramount Pictures and the author of Hello, He Lied. You can reach her at LyndaObst.com.