Women Are Dominating the Box Office Right Now

One look at all the superhero movies in the works, and it’s clear that Hollywood still builds its blockbusters with a male audience in mind. But that mentality may be changing.

So far in 2015, women have dominated the box office, driving huge ticket sales for movies like Cinderella, Fifty Shades of Grey, andInsurgent. Opening-weekend crowds for all three of these No. 1 films were between 60% and 70% women. Meanwhile, new movies tailored to male audiences – including the sci-fi films Chappie and Jupiter Ascending, the raunchy comedy Hot Tub Time Machine 2, and this weekend’s Sean Penn thriller The Gunman – have mostly fizzled. And the trend continues beyond big studio films, with the modestly budgeted, female-focused indie comedy The Duff making more than $32 million.  According to the New York Times, this translates to women being a more reliable box office draw than young men, for the first time in decades.

It’s not exactly news that female ticket-buyers can make or break a blockbuster. This “trend” has been reported steadily in the media since the first Twilight film premiered in 2008, reinforced by the success of movies like the Hunger Games franchise, Bridesmaids, andMaleficent. And last year, women made up 52% of movie audiences.

Still, Hollywood has been slow to see this as anything but a fluke. For decades, studios’ biggest movies (notably the summer tentpoles) have catered to young men, who were considered the most reliable source of opening-weekend income. But given the consistent success of films aimed at female audiences, it’s getting harder for Hollywood execs to ignore the numbers.

Adding urgency is the fact that overall movie ticket sales reached a two-decade low last year, mainly because that young male audience is no longer showing up in droves. The Times offers a few different possible explanations for this drop-off. One is that videogames and sports are luring young men away from the multiplex. Another is that teenage boys “do not want to be told when and where they have to consume entertainment,” which makes them less interested in going to an opening-weekend movie than girls the same age, who tend to view it as a social activity. Also, in this media-saturated age, expensive visual effects don’t harness the same audience-grabbing power they once did.

“You used to be able to go to movies and see something that you never saw before — a giant shark, dinosaurs. But spectacular visual effects have become routine,” says Cinderella producer Allison Shearmur. “So what does that mean? It means that we’ve got to make more movies that have a compelling core story. The audience still comes when the story is strong, when we can laugh or cry or be afraid in a theater together.”

In no way does this mean that comic-book movies or effects-heavy action films will become a dying breed; those movies still reliably generate ticket sales. What it does mean is that studios have a financial incentive to invent a new kind of blockbuster. Female audiences are proving that superheroes and exploding cars aren’t the only way to attract a crowd. And if Hollywood execs are re-discovering the importance of story and character, that’s good news for all movie fans, male or female.

Image credit: AP Photo/Disney, Jonathan Olley