The Good News Is—The Bad News was Wrong!

THE GOOD NEWS IS-THE BAD NEWS WAS WRONG

Imagine a movie that’s central premise was that to escape the humdrum of daily life, one must revert to alpha-male grade barbarism. Imagine it’s cast of young and appealing leads, chock full of explosions and fistfights. Imagine the advertising campaign and rave reviews lavished upon this production by critics itching for more controversy, more sensa­tionalism. Then, imagine it’s slow demise at the box office as it failed to attract the throngs of Americans it had expected and imagine the questions echoing through the industry: “Why!”

Last year, after the Columbine High School massacre, anyone looking at some of the extremely violent movies that were coming out, like the aforementioned Fight Club, and the vulnerability of the teenage audience, would conclude that the culture would both aggravate and be negatively influenced by a strong generational move among teenagers into hedonism and even barbarism.

The Columbine shootings seemed to symbolize this problem. In many of Hollywood’s more vicious films, there seemed to be role models for the next generation of brown shirts, black shirts and red shirts-the young shock troops who catapulted the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Lenin to power. However, this dire expectation was not to be, which shows that predicting audience psychographics is somewhat like looking at tea leaves. By the end of last year, the movies that triumphed at the box office were not the extreme psycho­pathic and sociopathic films, but movies with strong morals and often strong religious convictions. These are not the movies that the press spent lines of type touting. Rather, by January 1, 2000, the top movies turned out to be family movies about: an 8-year-old involved in a pod race (Phantom Menace which earned $430,443,350); a toy having to choose between fame and family (the superb Toy Story 2 which earned $208,851,257 after only a few weeks in release); a children’s character who swings through the trees (Tarzan which earned $170,904,824); and, of course, a little boy who is trying to deal with his fears and goes frequently to church to pray (Sixth Sense which earned $276,386,495).

In contrast, the most barbaric movies fared poorly at the box office; and so, by January 1, 2000: Fight Club earned only $36,515,098.00 after several months in release; Eyes Wide Shut earned only $55,655,882.00 after many months in release; and, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut earned only $52,037,603.00 after six months! Since the average movie ticket price is approximately $5, then only 7 million people went to Fight Club out of at least 272 million Americans. Since teenagers and young adults comprise 80% of the regular movie-going audience, the failures of these films shows that a substantial portion of these viewers decided against this fare.

Whereas the baby-boom generation set aside their coon skin caps and their Mickey Mouse Club memberships to idolize Bonnnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch when they came of age in the 1960s, most of the 77 million Generation Y/Baby Kaboom children born between 1979 and 1989 are not imitating their baby-boomer parents, but rather ap­pear to be seeking out the good, the true and the beautiful at the box office. They even by­passed the Academy Award nominees for more family–friendly films, and they continue to show interest in films and other movies with sense and sensibility rather than the hardcore fare. In a study of this new generation, the Disney Corp. has labeled this unique behavior the “granny factor” because these young people seem to be emulating the values of their grandparents, not their parents.

Some will say, however, “but look at the shootings by children and teenagers of their peers (which are now up to 21 or 22 teenagers).” Clearly, they are right to be concerned, but the “bad news sells” mentality of many in the press has led to a skewed portrait of our youth. A news article in one of the major newspapers (which shall remain unnamed) right after the Columbine shootings, announced in bold headlines that anti-social behavior among teenagers was said to be up 60 percent. This shocking statistic would get anyone to bar their doors, if they didn’t bother to read further in the article, where it was reported that this anti-social behavior had in fact increased from 1.2% to 1.97%. There is no doubt that this is a significant increase, but it still meant that 98% of the 77 million kids were not indulging in this behavior.

Of course, in the typical classroom, 2 percent of the students demand 98% of the atten­tion. They are the ones who cause the trouble. But, by focusing too much on these stu­dents, we are not only distorting the facts, but ignoring the good news: that the vast major­ity are not disrupting the class.

So the bottom line is that, as we enter this summer cinema season, there are hopeful signs that the most powerful people in the entertainment industry, the 14-year-old, is mak­ing better decisions than one would expect from psychographic predictions. Looking at the box office earnings, we see that movies with better values are doing better than their nega­tive counterparts.

However, there is a sage caveat-using these trends to predict the future is fraught with danger. The only safe way to know the future is to stay tuned and pray that this new gen­eration of consumers will continue to make media-wise choices.