Family Films are not doing well
...JUST MY LUCK opened under 6 million at the box office, making it Lindsay Lohan’s poorest showing. — Review by MARK STOKES
… Disney’s Family animation THE WILD pulled a mere $9,684,809 on its opening weekend?
…HOOT from Walden Media sink at the box office with $3,368,197 on its opening weekend? Walden Media is the family-friendly group behind the Narnia mega success. Are the faithful not supporting “the right kind of things� at the box office? Are they abandoning Walden Media?
Interestingly, the ICE AGE 2: The Meltdown has done extremely well with a gross of $183,435,937 as of
Bottom line: It is not necessarily true that families support family entertainment. Nor is it true that the public is hungry for so-called family-friendly entertainment! Does Dr. James Dobson, Ted Baher and the Dove Foundation know about this?
11 Comments:
Well cry me a river. THE WILD looked just like Madagascar, but with ruder jokes. HOOT's trailer featured police officers as the loser villains and the butt of jokes.
It's crazy for any studio to imagine that as long as /they/ know a movie is family-friendly, everyone else will too regardless of what the previews look like. And it's only slightly less crazy for studios to imagine that they can recycle old formulas without having people realize, now and then, that a film is too formulaic and predictable to be interesting.
It's not that anyone has woken up saying, "I do believe I will abandon Walden Media today." It's just that quality, originality, and good advertising are just as important when it comes to family films as they are in other films. This should be news to no one.
Bottom line: families don't support family movies that don't look palatable or that are not clearly promoted as a family film. But we would still rather watch a well-made family movie than other kinds of movies.
Hi David,
The only thing operating here is marketing. That's all. I'm a movie buff and honestly, I have hardly heard anything about Just My Luck or The Wild or Hoot. I've heard about Ice Age 2 at every turn.
That's all it is. Marketing. it's not about which films have particular values. Relatively speaking, very few people are concerned about issues like these. The kids see the commercials or the toys from their happy meals they and want to go to that particular film--so that's the one Dad takes them to on Saturday afternoon. It's that simple.
Marketing? You are right. However, I am always troubled by those like Michael Madvig and The Dove Foundation that claim Family Films (G-rated) are what the public craves. I tend to think there is a censorship issue going on.
Christian Fundamentalists are NOT supporting the type of film some claim they want to see.
Hey James, I agree it is about well made films. Good stories. Totally agree. A well made film (Passion of Christ, Matrix, Narnia, Harry Potter) do not have to be Family Friendly nor G-rated to get an audience. And they can be as well. It really has more to do with quality of story etc.
That said, I did enjoy The Wild.
Say what? Ice Age 2 supports Global Warming? That's rather a stretch, don't you think? It seems you went way out of your way to diss the "Fundamentalists", which says something about YOUR bias, don't you think? :o)
Mark Sommer
Indiana
Dave Bruce said: I am always troubled by those like Michael Madvig and The Dove Foundation that claim Family Films (G-rated) are what the public craves. I tend to think there is a censorship issue going on.
People standing up for what they believe in is NOT censorship. Are the opinions expressed by these groups too narrow sometimes? Probably. But having an opinion is not censorship. None of these groups is trying to make it illegal to make a "non-family-friendly" film. (They are for enforcing obsenity laws which already exist, but that is a different matter.) They are primarily informing those who agree with them about the content of films. Certainly they are trying to persuade others to think as they do, but I see nothing wrong with that. Free exercise of religion is meaningless unless its expression includes the right to attempt to persuade others. It seems to me that there is much more of a desire among those who disagree with Dobson, et al. to censor THEM then there is a desire on the Fundamentalists' part to censor anything. Perhaps much of what they say does actually hit close to home?
Mark Sommer
Granger, Indiana
Hey Mark. Thanks for dropping by. You say "Say what? Ice Age 2 supports Global Warming?"
Sure, consider the title: "Ice Age 2 The Meldown." Meltdown! That is Global Warming. The whole film is about the changing earth pattern due to meltdown.
Also about your second comment, I, like you, truly do believe they speak what they believe -and that is good. Agreed. However, behind their stand, I believe, is a censorship issue/agenda.
Consider the rhetoric when the "Last Temptation of Christ" came out. Or, even look at Dobson's attempt at censoring the very Word of God as presented in the Revised NIV (now TNIV).
Regardless of what my fundy brothers and sisters may think, unless the film has a good story the rest does not matter. I just watched again the 1986 film Hoosiers. It is a good family film that did rather well...mainly because the story is good and acting excellent. I have been surpised that Akeelah and the Bee has not done better.
Akeelah and the Bee is very good film. Inspiring actually. There does not seem to be any "magic formula" at the box office. Even good films with good stories do not always do as well as I would tend to think.
David,
While I agree with your comment that "There does not seem to be any 'magic formula' at the box office," I wonder what, exactly, your criteria are for "family films."
There are probably a number of factors that contribute to Lindsay Lohan's "Just My Luck" having her lowest box office numbers to date. Whether it is fair or not, if there is any creedence to the notion of "actors/actresses as role models," our friend, Lindsay has gone through some changes that probably contribute to the low box office numbers. Her barely-clad photo spread in Vanity Fair (I think it was Vanity Fair) in which she ambivalently alludes to a possible struggle with a possible eating disorder was probably a major contributing factor. I'm not saying that the scrutiny is fair, but she has opened herself up to it and is not the first actress to do so, probably at her publicist's recommendation. She couldn't stay the cute, freckled, redhead child star forever. The movie is PG-13. Many would define G or PG (sometimes) to be a "family film" and PG-13 to be yesterday's R.
Ice Age 2 is probably big at the box office because Ice Age 1 was. It has a talented ensemble cast. I doubt that any environmentalist overtones contribute as much to it's success as the fact that it is a sequel to a box office success.
If an environmentalist theme was what hooked people, "Hoot" would be doing better. The only star I recognize in Hoot is Jimmy Buffett, and that's because I know his music.
I think you are being narrow and short-sighted, David.
Maybe its your proximity to Hollywood? They too seem to suffer from the same ailment. They seem to find patterns which are not tied to the deeper threads in the films they produce. They miss the powerful story in SPIDERMAN and conclude erroneously that America loves comic books and SPFX. So they make HELLBOY and DAREDEVIL and THE PUNISHER (and worse) which had convoluted, nearly stultifying plots devoid of redeeming themes, and then wonder why these films didn't do as well as SPIDERMAN -- even with big marketing budgets.
I am reminded of so-called "asparagus pee." There is a chemical in the veg which not everyone can smell. Most would say, What's that awful smell? Meanwhile others would say, What smell? The jaded in Hollywood simply have no grid for what the majority in America perceive as having a foul odor.
AKEELAH had a particularly narrow market, as I see it. Anyone who thought it could succeed today was kidding themselves. Regardless of the MPAA rating, it had a child hero from the inner city with heavy themes beyond that young age target and with a heroine far younger than would appeal to adults. Not to mention, a feature film about a spelling bee??? Why not make a movie focusing on 4H? (Believe it or not there are far more kids involved in that than spelling bees.) And even if the film was wonderful, the current approach to film distribution wouldn't afford it a chance to build an audience. Only films which have associated with them a wildly important agenda to those in Hollywood receive that kind of patience (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH).
Quality is of course an issue for any filmgoer. HOOT was poorly written and poorly executed, regardless of environmental themes, not to mention that it had some rather disturbing messages in it (for example, a troubled runaway who's sheltered by his young friends in an abandoned boat so his father won't punish him, deception of parents without repercussions, etc.). Insiders at Walden know that the film was not going to succeed and so almost shelved it.
But historically and statistically, family-friendly films do VERY well. It isn't the opinion of Michael Medved and Ted Baehr, it is verifiable fact. Having said that, there is more to the equation, like knowing the market -- which Hollywood has only tangential understanding or consideration of. And there is the fact that a PG film today is the PG-13 or worse of yesterday. (As a father, trust me, kids don't pop out more "sophisticated" because they are born today, folks! It takes dedicated effort to jade them into so-called "sophistication.") But there are indeed uncontrollable variables, and this is true in all businesses.
Rev. Kevin makes an excellent point about Lindsay Lohan's real-life persona. I think this is why CINDERELLA MAN didn't do as well as it deserved (thanks to its star's assault on a hotel worker at the time). To this I would add that Lohan is most definitely not a family-friendly icon any longer, and it would seem that as a troubled young woman her future choices will be even less so as Hollywood pressures her to prove herself as an actor, moving her into darker and darker waters. Her first lesbian screen kiss cannot be far off.
But David, you omit another aspect which I think most observers overlook: the power of film critics.
For the last 25 years, America has been trained to heel to reviews. I have lost count of the number of great movies which have come out in the last 15 years which were panned by critics, especially those which have heart from a Judeo-Christian perspective, lambasted as "overly sentimental," "heart on its sleeve," "heavy-handed." Many of the acknowledged great films of all time would fail in today's cynical, jaded, edgy-craving critical milieu. Even a critic like Joel Siegel who walked out of Kevin Smith's CLERKS 2 felt it necessary to call this sloppy and amateurish movie maker "very talented." It astounds me that any critic finds this man talented, but such is the environment into which "family-friendly" is launched. Is it any wonder that films like SHREK for children include potty humor and swearing in order to appeal to the dark stars of today's cadre of film critics?
Meanwhile, I have also stopped counting the number of films I have seen, universally heralded, for which I wished I could get my money back, most recently THE LIFE AQUATIC and SIDEWAYS, the latter of which was universally described as "uplifting," an appelation which is beyond my ability to comprehend. In fact, I no longer read reviews at face value. I have been forced to view them paradoxically: their black is my white, their up is my down, and so on.
The public, including the faith community in America, has been trained to check the critics' reviews before deciding what to see. Once in a great while word of mouth can promote a film, but the way the Studios now distribute makes such groundswells virtually impossible. By the time a friend can tell me to see a movie, if the critics don't agree, it is out of the theater before I can get a chance to see it.
It appears to me there may be an unwitting conspiracy to censor what is good, but it isn't on the part of the Christian faithful, but rather on the part of the peculiar choices of those who have the power to make movies, and to make or break them.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between what defines good and family in Hollywood and these in Flyoverland where the consumers live. To Hollywood family-friendly means no nudity and no F-bombs, but the themes are still not family-friendly in most G and PG films. And crass, barnyard humor, including less severe curse words, which are not tolerated in most American homes is present in nearly all G and PG films targeting children. To Hollywood THE PASSION crowd would be just as open to seeing some New Age tract like WHAT DREAMS MAY COME or TV's BOOK OF DANIEL. "What? It's all religious, isn't it? All paths lead to God, right?" They simply cannot see the difference.
I think what we're seeing, David, is simply the market pulling away further away from Hollywood and the slump will continue, especially if Hollywood draws the same conclusion you have. "See, America isn't at all like the Bible-thumpers say!"
If a restaurant (or any other consumer-driven concern) ran its business the way Hollywood does, by Group Think, it would have been out of business a LONG time ago. "But our family loves crickets on our pizza... I guess the customers are spending their extra money on iPod downloads and video games."
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