The greatest excuse in the entire world used to be “sorry, I had female problems.” The best get out of jail free card ever, since red-blooded males have no interest in asking follow-up questions and girls won’t call out other girls for fear it may draw too much attention and spoil the alibi for them all. It’s really beautiful in its evasive, vague simplicity, but the jig is up. That song and dance has ended, whitewashed by the new reprieve to end all reprieves: the recession. It’s not our fault State Of Play didn’t make money; adults just can’t go the movies with a recession mucking their lives up.
Well, I’m calling bullshit. Not on the charge adults aren’t going to the movies anymore but on the assumption adults went to the movies in the first place. Why do we even keep this laughable charade of generation-bending cinema up? We have no problem admitting music is, by and large, a young man’s rebellion, but still, the cinema is supposed to be this utopian refuge for Goldwater Girls and SLC Punks to mingle freely amongst each other like gossipy PTA mothers. The truth is the average forty-something doesn’t give two shits about most of the fare Hollywood is peddling, even if it’s exclusively aimed at their demographic.
Marketing anything other than Titliest irons and a new Lexus at middle-aged men is a fruitless endeavor. Most of them like the things they like because those are the things they like and a few Russell Crowe teasers aren’t going to do a damn thing to change that, but this well-known fact hasn’t stopped the big studios from humping their hip economic scapegoat. In a new Hollywood Reporter article, the publication, which should be noted is about as free from outside interests as "The Watchtower", seeks to place the blame for State Of Play’s less than fifteen million dollar opening weekend on this goddamn recession.
“Pricey, star-driven thrillers and dramas will struggle for profitability as the recession intensifies a trend toward youth-dominated openings… State Of Play’s travails reflect this rude awakening in Hollywood: Older demos may be resisting the recent enthusiasm for moviegoing.” Yeah, that must be it. Older demographics have simply realized the recession is on and taken the money they previously spent on good-not-great cinema and purchased millions of Shamwow towels.
The average American lives paycheck to mouth. They deal with most necessary expenses and then blow the rest on dumb shit they impulsively calculate is relevant. This consumerist stupidity is an essential part of the American Dream and, unlike the motion picture industry, actually transcends age. Sort of. Most people go see movies for the same reason they bought The Club in 1996 or the Shamwow last Christmas; their friends were talking about it. You’re either in on the joke or you’re not and most people like to be in on the joke. That’s why movies like Shrek make a billion dollars. Most youngsters are unwilling to sit in the lunchroom and listen to their buddies quote Donkey without getting in on the action themselves. So, they scratch and stomp their feet and moan wildly until an adult forks over nine dollars. Multiply that tantrum fifty million times and you’ve got an epic Blockbuster on your hands. But that rarely happens with movies like State Of Play. Not because adults have outgrown the siren call of peer pressure but because no one they care about gives a shit about State Of Play.
Most adults don’t go to the movies because most adults don’t go to the movies. None of their friends are talking about Revolutionary Road or Atonement so they feel no need to go see Revolutionary Road or Atonement. It’s the old snowball effect. Two people tell two people who tell two people who turn the pyramid scheme into a hundred million dollar bonanza. But when no one says shit, the whole process crumbles under the weight of lofty budgets and misjudged expectations. And it’s not like you can predict the snowball effect. I mean who the hell saw Liam Neeson’s Taken making two hundred million dollars? It’s an inexact science when it comes to adult obsessions, and unless studios start listening to common sense and recalculating budgets, they’ll be in for a heap of trouble.
The median adult-oriented drama is not going to make a hundred million dollars, even if it stars Julia Roberts, Russell Crowe and Andy Rooney. Grown-ups have a thousand different things they can randomly invest themselves in at any given time. Sports, politics, the economy, their children, their parents, their love lives, religion and even recently-opened pizza places are all more likely conversation starters among forty-somethings than why that detached douche bag didn‘t save Kate Winslet in The Reader, and even when something like Pretty Woman captivates Middle America, it doesn’t inspire the Bible Belters to see different films, just to go see the same hot-topic ones over again. The whole process is a losing prospect, and the recession has nothing to do with it.
Adults will never hit up the multi-plexes en mass because they don’t hit up the multi-plxes en mass. But Hollywood will never accept that routine indifference because every five years a Godfather or Heat will come along and inspire your Uncle D’Wayne to go buy a bag of BunchACrunch, thus proving mature cinema can be profitable. Spoiler alert: it’s not. But the studios and shitty tool publications like The Hollywood Reporter will keep pointing the finger at Economic Policy because it’ll help line up new gullible investors down the road. If it was me, I’d tell everyone I ran out of tampons because that is and will always be the better excuse.
