Geezer moviegoers
N.Y. Times contributor Stephen Farber on the difficulty of getting Hollywood distributors to wake up to older moviegoers, and the resulting struggles that have occupied the makers of Boynton Beach Club Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and Ladies in Lavender. The best quote is from Richard Zanuck, producer of the hugely suiccessful older-folks flm Driving Miss Daisy. “After the movie succeeded,”Zanuck tells Farber, “one executive told me that Driving Miss Daisy was a ‘nonrecurring phenomenon.’ Millions of people went to the theater to see it. Why is that nonrecurring?”
Isn’t this, to some extent, the same audience that thronged to see MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING?
Dimwit, it’s also the same audience that goes to see most of the Oscar nominated pictures and everything that is deemed “independent.” Not every theater goer in America is a brain dead, adolescent obsessed with comic books and graphic novels. American popular culture isn’t complete hijacked by the teenage male mentality. Not yet.
To the first coment: Hey, dimwit, it’s also the same audience that goes to see most of the Oscar nominated pictures and everything that is deemed “independent.” Not every theater goer in America is a brain dead, adolescent obsessed with comic books and graphic novels. American popular culture isn’t complete hijacked by the teenage male mentality. Not yet.
Hey, dimwit, learn how to spell the word “comment”.
It’s at the top of the page…
And why the hell go off on that? I’m actually in agreement with you, turd brain.
It has always amazed me how studios and advertisers instinctively go for a younger deomgraphic (18-34) when the people with the most disposable income and time or willingness to sit in a theater are older.
And Dixon, I also thought your note about My Big Fat Greek Wedding was a slam, probably because that move was a piece of crap and a broad spectrum just kept going and going and going to it. But thank God, still no sequel in sight.
You got that from one innocuous sentence. Hmmm.
Not at all. Personally, I didn’t care for it, but one can’t deny its huge popularity.
And the two times I tried to get through it, the audience was noticibly older and loving it.
In fact, it tested older, and the distributors went for the adult audience, which kept coming, and coming in record numbers.
Believe me, Zoey, when I’m slamming something, you’ll know it…
Dixon,
Point taken. (-:
Ps, Nothing is innocuous on this site. All wording must be pulled apart for inner meaning hahaha.
DRIVING MISS DAISY is one of my favorite Hollywood business stories:
A moderate success on Broadway
A Pulitzer Prize winner
A Well Respected cast with name recognition
Said cast willing to work for scale
A $7.5M budget
And no one wanted to make it.
According to an interview Zanuck did at the time for the NY Times, if memory serves, he was told basically there just wasn’t enough profit potential.
To me it was a no-brainer: it was no-lose project. You knew it would recoup it’s costs and make some money. It was clearly positioned to be Oscar-bait. Why not just go ahead, make it and take the chance on doing even better?
Because even when it comes to matters of business, these MBA trend watcher execs who think they know this industry’s fiscal realities don’t know dick.
DAISY did $106M domestically and $145M Worldwide gross. Factor in video and you can see that it was one of Warner Bros. top earners that year.
And no one wanted to make it.