My parents visited a few weekends ago, and I tried to pitch them on going back to movie theaters more often. Over the past year they’ve gone occasionally to see 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Top Gun: Maverick, Wherܫe the Crawdads Sing, A Man Called Otto, and Downton Abbey: A New Era, but mostly they watch TV from the comfort ♓of their living room.
I grew up going to the movies a lot, and after a few years as a lapsed filmgoer, I headed back to theaters as soon as my second vaccine dose had been swimming in my bloodstream for two weeks. But for others, like my parents, COVID was a reason to let the habit slip. As we head into a summer movie season that’s looking to be all blockbusters all the time, Hollywood isn’t making a great argument that thos🔯e audiences should come back.
During that conversation with my parents, my mom looked up what was playing at her local theater — a small multiplex — and read them off: 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Fast X, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Little Mermaid, The Machine, and The Boogeyman. The best I could muster is, “Uhh,🍬 maybe you would like The Machi𝔉ne.”
Reader, I know for a fact that my parents would not enjoy seeing an R-rated action comedy starring a perpetually shirtless stand-up comedian who they are not remotely familiar with. This would be like if high school me had recommended they go see The Hangover or Get Him to the Greek. But, it’s a testament to the current dire state of the wide release that a Bert Kreishcer vehicle was the closest I could come to recommending something they would like. I’ve written recently about the sheer number of w🌟ildly expensive blockbustersꦍ playing in theaters this summer, and this is the necessary corollary. There just isnꦏ’t much for older adults.
The theater in my parents’ town only has seven screens, but the options at my AMC, which boasts ten, weren’t much better. The same movies were playing, but so were 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Super Mario Bros. Movie, About My Father, and Kandahar. The last two might have a slightly better chance with my parents — About My Father i🦄s a PG-13 family comedy, and Kandahar is a Gerard Butler action movie set in Afghanistan — but they’re outliers, and neither got much of a push from its studio.
There’s something wrong when every movie playing in a theater🍸 is aimed at the same demographic, and that’s exactly the case at my parents’ theater. Some are more female skewing, as in the case of The Little Mermaid, and some have a larger following overseas, as in the case of Fast X, but all of them are aimed at young people, and most are aimed at young men. Movies for older audiences have been increasingly marginalized in movie theaters. Most have been shunted to streaming with the expectation that older audiences just aren’t interested in leaving the house post-COVID.
But that isn’t really true. The George Clooney and Julia Roberts romantic comedy Ticket to Paradise grossed $172.1 million worldwide and Tom Hanks’ drama A Man Called Otto made $112.6 million. And with $89.7 million, Ben Affleck’s Nik🔴e drama Air would have been quite successful if not for its extremely high $70-90 million dollar budget. Older audiences are hungry for star-driven, entertain🅰ing movies, but Hollywood just isn’t giving them much to watch.