We Lost It at the Movies
How Hollywood freaked out over vanishing audiences - whove now magically
reappeared - and why teenage boys are a studios worst habit.
By Lynda Obst
You may have heard that recently, the entire audience for movies
disappeared. Poof. You can imagine that this was quite a blow to
movie-industry types. This mysterious disaster seemed to last an eternity
but actually endured nine months. Still, it was the cruelest of all of the
binge-and-purge cycles Ive seen in Hollywood. This one had everyone
believing it was really over, that we were technologically obsolete. Many
mini-conferences were convened to explain the debacle, scores of meetings
at studios tried to unpack the crisis, various reports broke it down to
the moguls as hushed conversations with wives and business managers took
place throughout the summer and fall. Well-planned lives seemed on the
verge of imploding all over town. Young Turks were eyeing video games.
Then, astonishingly, the movie audience reappeared. Why?
The crisis began with the unexpected failure of what was, in retrospect, a
gamble at best for June: Cinderella Man, from the preternaturally
successful team of Brian Grazer; his partner, the gifted Ron Howard; and
Oscar-winning Russell Crowe. It seemed destined for greatness; their last
entry, A Beautiful Mind, had won an Academy Award for Universal. And this
one had perky Renée Zellweger. But no matter what they did - spending
irrational amounts of money, even offering a money-back guarantee - no
audience would show up. Perhaps the audience was too stupid to want
meaningful movies this season, the studio wondered. Surely they should see
the virtues of this film. Then panic set in. Was it marketing? The fact
that Crowe had thrown a phone in a hotel clerks face? It never occurred
to them that there might be a problem with the movie, which one young man
described to me as Seabiscuit with Russell Crowe playing the horse.
Then other surefire entries started to fail, the kind that are supposed to
open in summer, no problemo: July brought Stealth, Rob Cohens $135
million . . . what, exactly? Thriller? Action movie? Starring Jamie Foxx,
Jessica Biel, and Josh Lucas, it opened to a measly $13 million. And
October brought Doom literally, which had started off tracking like
gangbusters. (The industry watches the tracking - the statistical
prognostications based on surveys - the way politicians watch polls, with
similar results.) Based on one of the most successful video games of all
time, it would have to be a blockbuster, wouldnt it? The tracking
continued to build until the week of the movies debut, when it collapsed.
If the kids didnt come to Doom, starring The Rock, we could no longer
call anything. Everyone had bet on video games - execs had been running
off to Comic-Con, the annual comic-book convention in San Diego, like
lemmings, buying comic characters, video games, and graphic novels - and
now Doom, which ultimately did $28 million in domestic box office. This
was beyond horrible. Word of mouth killed Doom before it even opened. This
was news; bad news.
And so, come October, I found myself at a lovely if crushingly depressing
lunch hosted by the cutting-edge upstart market-research company OTX, at
the Peninsula, munching glumly on my mandarin-orange salad. They were here
to explain what had gone so terribly wrong. We were seated at small round
tables with marketing types from the studios (and many ex-marketers; they
are the first to be fired when movies flop - i.e., its the marketing,
dummy! Not the movie!) and assorted producers like me looking to figure
out what was hot and what was not, and why. And the gist of what we heard
was this: Young men were too busy to go to the movies anymore. They would
rather play video games on Friday nights or be on the Internet playing
video games with strangers or hooking up or pretending to be hooking up or
playing video games with or without the person they had just hooked up
with.
As for the baby-boomers - or the upper-quadrant audience, as we know
them - the movie experience had so deteriorated (bad food, sound, seats,
etc.) that they would rather wait for the DVD. They all now had fabulous
home entertainment systems, which their teenagers appropriated when they
finally felt like seeing the movie they had missed playing video games.
This wisdom was imparted with the help of graphs and charts and
statistics, which made my eyes twitch. Afterward, everybody trundled home,
cashed in whatever movie stock they had, and repeated these verities to
everyone they knew. The New York Times printed them, too, and it became
fact: The movie audience was kaput.
There was a moment from September to December when everyone was stumped by
what movies to make. We would sit at dinner and say, It cant just be Saw
III, can it? And then wed weep into our martinis. One casting director
said to me, The studios will only make comedies, and those with only four
people, two of whom were in Wedding Crashers!
Then, suddenly, right around the Oscars, semi-obscured by that ceremonys
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 youre afraid he wont 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
Perrys - who? - Madeas 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 shouldnt 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 wasnt 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 hadnt figured any of that
out yet.)
March 10 brought Failure to Launch, Matthew McConaugheys 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 Lees 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 OTXs 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.
Its easy to assume that suddenly we were making movies the audience
wanted to see. But we cant 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 bulls-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 thats 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 Charlies
Angels: Full Throttle and Matrix Whatever. We thought it was about
sequels, when it was really about word of mouth.
So we cant 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 Somethings
Gotta Give proved that older women were worth making movies for, but one
strike with In Her Shoes and were 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 theres the need to wean ourselves from other old habits and
scapegoats. Its the movie, stupid. Not the marketing. (Though marketers
shouldnt 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. Its
harder, but not impossible. Impossible means we have to sell the farm.
Hard means we have to work harder. And thats 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 [http://www.lyndaobst.com/].
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