COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: A neglected audience is served
Jeff Simon
Updated: 07/22/08 10:16 AM
The big movie box office story over the weekend wasn’t the record setting $155 million for “The Dark Knight.” Honest. Nor was it that movie’s equally mark-setting $66 million opening day.
Those were to be expected. “The Dark Knight” had everything in the world going for it — not just a bravura and magnificently creepy posthumous performance by a young actor, Heath Ledger, whose excesses killed him too young, but an obvious overall status as one of the best movies of the year. Add all that to a long-standing blockbuster comic book franchise and you’ve got a movie ready to dynamite every box office in sight.
No, the really interesting story to me is the $27 million box office for the No. 2 film last weekend, “Mamma Mia!,” a pitilessly and energetically mediocre version of the world-conquering stage musical enshrining ABBA’s relentlessly bouncy MOR songbook (“Dancing Queen,” “SOS,” “Waterloo,” etc.)
It’s now official. The Hollywood geniuses have finally figured out that they’ve been absurdly neglecting an enthusiastic movie audience for years, maybe decades: The “girls’ night out” audience, the women who enjoy congregating for a good, happy, cheap night out, whether they’re 14 or 54 (or older).
In the middle of that age scale, you had the median for the $57 million opening weekend for “Sex and the City,” a movie whose advance hype was even larger than that for “The Dark Knight.” Both had built-in, long-established audiences fulminating with expectation.
Everyone knew “Sex and the City” was going to ring box-office chimes on its opening weekend. What was interesting was its second weekend. The movie slid from No. 1 to No. 5, BUT still pulled in $20 million, according to the figures everyone uses (their unquestioned accuracy, by the way, is a whole other story).
Game. Set. Match.
At that moment, anyone who didn’t know that a “girls’ night out” audience was large and here to stay was hopelessly out to lunch.
Frankly, I realized something strange was going on when I reviewed an excruciating “chick flick” called “Evening,” which wasted one of the most impressive casts of modern times (Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Toni Collette and Claire Danes, all in the same film). As bad as the movie was — and was known to be almost everywhere the first time people got a look at it — I kept hearing reports of intelligent women congregating in the audience, usually in groups.
They were so happy to have something — anything — star-filled that wasn’t aimed at teen boys that they were willing to put up with any aesthetic catastrophe.
Remember, we’re talking here about a movie centered around Vanessa Redgrave on her deathbed.
Just imagine, then, what would happen if you put Streep, a couple of high-horsepower scene stealers (Julie Walters, Christine Baranski) and a trio of acceptably studly middle-aged male actors (Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth) into a movie whose relentlessly amateurish choreography is the equivalent of the first six minutes of Ellen DeGeneres’ afternoon talk show — and based, no less, on the genuinely phenomenal international success of the stage musical.
Instant “girls’ night out” — an Ellen show at your local megaplex.
Yes, its box office might be a fraction of “The Dark Knight,” but it is, nonetheless, real and it reflects as deep and genuine a minority need in the movie audience as the latest teen comedy or horror movie for the fumbling finger set on date night.
Don’t let the whopper numbers confuse you completely: The 2008 establishment of a beachead for “girls’ night out” movies was one of the bigger movie stories of the year.
