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The Changing Audience

© Ken Nared

The movie business like all other life is alive and ever evolving and that means the audience is evolving as much as the people and technology that produce the movies. The first crude films of people doing everyday chores pleased an audience that had never seen such things before but as anyone a few minutes old in entertainment biz know audience taste will change and if you want to keep filling seats in theaters you had better change with the audience or be left by the roadside as a has been. While this is an inevitable force that actors face, the people who serve up the movies have the option of following the taste of the audience wherever they go. As the near destruction of many studios that took place when television was born shows, either do what is necessary or face the consequences.

The fracturing of the audience comes about for several reasons, not the least of which is the Internet. As the first movie audiences quickly became sophisticated after watching early films, saturation by new technology is making the film audience jaded at a faster rate that ever before. The sense of wonder that a "Star Wars" or "Raiders of the lost Ark" easily captured twenty years ago, and of course can be seen over and over thanks to the technology of the VCR and now DVD, is harder to come by in todays movie. And even if a script is capable of doing so the cost has become such that films of that type, "Titanic" for example, must be shared by more that one studio. On top of that the audience taste perhaps has never fractured so along the standard demographic lines.

Teens and earlier twenties really drive the studios production schedule today. The middle age demographic of course is still large in the studios thinking because they to go to the movies, but not in the numbers teens do. So called 'chick flicks' have come of age also taking in dollars the would have been thought impossible just five years ago. This is based in part of women's greater economic independence and in part on women gaining more clout in Hollywood

Perhaps the greatest sign of the audience changing in taste is the seeming critic proof movie. In the past two years even the most vitriolic denouncement of a film has had no effect of the movies bottom line. Several films that were ranked by critics as poor were number one films and brought in significant box office money.

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