What Did They Watch and Why: Notes on the Moviegoing Public

When COVID-19 invaded from the People’s Republic of China, Americans meekly obeyed mandatory lock-downs, stayed home, wore masks, subjected their kids to Zoom lessons, and avoided crowded places like movie theaters. Movie marketers, long the denizens of red carpet grand openings, were stuck. How does one market a first-run, big-budget movie when nobody’s out there, munching popcorn in the dark and thrilling to life on the silver screen?

So, what do audiences like watching, we pondered. Everyone knows that DVDs and TV have made serious inroads into brick-and-mortar movie theaters. Tracking viewership of mass media bears out some long-held truths of movie marketers: The numbers don’t lie. A movie must open at $20 to $40 million in revenue if it’s going to have traction long term. There has to be a “want” established among the viewing public. A major studio film budgets a minimum of $120 million to produce and sell, with one third reserved for marketing. The targets are broken down into groups: male, female, young, old, poor, middle class, filthy rich, racial/ethnic identity.

The received word is that young males like blood, explosions, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter and sex. But not romance, old folks, family life, death, sensitivity, or, God forbid, guilt. They’re 15 - 29 and could care less.

Young females (same age group) like friendship, fashion, pop music, sarcasm, romance and sensitive boys who think with their hearts—but not sex (although they enjoy hearing the naughty girl telling her pals about it). Girls and boys both go to horror films, but the girls hate gore. Instead, you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down that dark hallway.

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies (romance, heartbreak). They are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They like seeing an older woman having her pick of men, but hate seeing a child in danger. Once they reach 30, these women become the most “review-sensitive.” Much critical praise for a movie targeting older women can grow the opening weekend’s gross by five to ten million dollars (think anything with Meryl Streep*). In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

By contrast, older men like darker films, classic genres like Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes and women, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, especially if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them. But, as women know, men are hard to motivate. Said one marketing consultant, “Guys only get off the couch twice a year, to go see Wild Hogs or 3:10 to Yuma. If all you have is older males, it’s time to take a pill, or jump, or get workman’s comp.”

Movie marketers have a few rules for making their films “relatable”: 1) Can’t we all get along? (black and white conflict is now verboten in the Age of Woke, unless the hero/aggressor is black/Hispanic). 2) If the poster shows a poster child, the movie is for kids. 3) Everybody’s a comedian (especially true for male viewers of any age). 4) If it has a title like The Squid and the Whale, it’s somebody else’s problem (if a movie doesn’t haul cash on the first weekend, an awkward title is often seen as the culprit.) 5) Always cheat death (stars can be courageous, conflicted, super charged alive, even missing, but if they’re dead, who cares?).

For many marketers their campaigns (“the science”) hinge on which old movie your new movie is like—it’s called “pre-awareness.” The top ten grossing movies of the last decade were all pre-awareness, with ties to comics—SpiderMan is case in point—TV series, or Oscar-winning directors and stars. Familiarity breeds comfort until it breeds contempt. Take Will Smith, a former A-list star. He smacked Chris Rock in front of the entire planet. Now he’s box office poison.

A “tentpole” picture like Pirates of the Caribbean holds up the entire studio and grosses enough money to hold together lesser films. Pirates began as a Disneyland theme park star and the whole world knew about it. The film became a five-picture “franchise” and grossed over $4.5 billion worldwide, the first film franchise to gross over one billion dollars, not including toys, costumes, board games and what-all. If you liked this film, you were in all of the above target groups, except Older Women, though their fondness for Johnny Depp and the fun they’d had at Disney World with the grandkids prompted millions of them to buy tickets.

The post-Covid world has changed. Life is more violent. School kids are flunking out of reading and math. Marvel comics lead the movie pack. Audiences are slowly returning, though in 2022 just 33% of viewers actually went to a movie theater. Stay tuned.

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*Except The Devil Wears Prada, a title that prompted many women to assume it was a horror movie. But the film made money when audiences saw fancy wardrobes, Starbucks coffee and warmth and style in the trailers. And women viewers loved Meryl Streep’s white hair.