Hollywood’s survival might depend on figuring out what women want
In many ways, 2017 the movie year has been unsettled as 2017 the year in everything else: If the past 12 months can be reduced to a pithy phrase, it might be “radical re alignment .”
The year began in tumult, with Meryl Streep calling out the reality-TV star who had recently been elected presidentand a gobsmacking gaffe at the Oscars when “Moonlight” won best picture after “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the big winner. The year continued a pace, as Hollywood careered haphazardly between wildly unexpected successes and “sure things” that bombed justas dramatically.
The year’s first sleeper hit, Jordan Peele’s satirical horror movie “Get Out,” was part of a larger trend of horror pictures that did smashingly well at the box office, including “Split ,”“Anna belle: Creation” and “It.” But the most eerie thing about a movie that ingeniously combined laughs and jump scares to critique the most subtle ills of racism was how it anticipated a year when white supremacists made news, emboldened by a president they viewed as tacitly and sometimes even explicitly supportive.
“Wonder Woman” turned out to be even more successfully and uncannily prescient, as its director, Patty Jenkins, has become the highest-grossing female filmmaker of all time. Studio executives who have spent decades catering to teenage boys learned their core audience is more interested in a genuinely compelling woman who saves the day than another dude in spandex going through the motions. As Hollywood faltered with such big-budget flops as “Baywatch,” “Alien: Covenant,” the new “Transformers” movie and a misguided “Mummy” reboot, female audiences turned out in droves to see the live-action “Beauty and the Beast,” “Wonder Woman” and “Girls Trip” (as well as the indie breakout hit “The Big Sick” and, later, the beguiling coming-of-age dramedy “Lady Bird”).
Whichmade it all the more galling when the year’s biggest blockbuster opened — not a movie but a scathing New York Times exposé of movie executive Harvey Weinstein and how for years he has sexually harassed, exploited and even assaulted the female actors and executives in his orbit. (Weinstein has denied charges of rape and has disputed many of his accusers’ accounts.) As similarly distressing stories cascaded — not only about Weinstein but also about several men in the business — the connection between the biases and blind spots of male gatekeepers and the dreary movie monoculture of heroic men and hyper sexualized women became appallingly clear.
The industry experienced yet another seismic jolt when Disney bought 21st Century Fox in a deal that has reduced the “Big Six” studios to five. The very day the deal was announced, Streep, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg were visiting The Washington Post discussing their new movie, “The Post,” a Fox production that epitomizes the kind of film that is even more in danger of being consigned tostreaming giants like Netflix and Amazon.
Spielberg expressed anxieties about the changes roiling an industry that experienced nearly a 5 percent decline in attendance this year. “I like that there’s all these places, all these homes that are willing to accept good storytellers,” he said. “But how will the movie theaters react when everybody decides to go to the movies at someone else’s living room, as opposed to out into the world, into a theater?”
Theaters are already reacting\ by adding recliner seats and high-end concessions. And audiences have already proved that they crave the collective experience of seeing a film on the big screen, whether it’s to scream together at “Get Out,” laugh at “Girls Trip” or gasp at a magnificent visual spectacle like “Dunkirk.”
But another unspoken truth about moviegoing was self-evident during a trip to my hometown of Des Moines. On Christmas Day, my family and I ran into a former colleague of my father’s at a packed screening of “Darkest Hour.” As he took his seat, our friend joked, “[My wife] bought the tickets, so she gets to decide where we sit.”
I immediately recalled something that Amy Pascal — who produced “The Post” as well as “Molly’s Game” — told me: Despite the movie industry being run by middleaged men, that cohort is the hardest to get into theaters. It’s the wives, mothers, girlfriends and, in my case, bossy adult daughters who more often than not decide whether to stay home and watch “The Crown” or venture to the multiplex.
From rethinking corporate leadership and business practices to re-framing what ends up on the screen, Hollywood’s most radical realignment would be to finally figure out what women want and why its survival depends onthe answer.