SMART FAMILY FARE RULES
Animated films that speak to everyone are riding a wave of box office success
Steven Spielberg and most of Hollywood have met their match this summer with intelligent cartoon critters.
If there was any question that families play a major role in box office success, think about this: An animated film has topped all comers for four consecutive weeks, and Finding Dory took less than a month to become 2016’s biggest-grossing movie thus far (with PG films accounting for half of the top 10). The Secret Life of
Pets is just the newest hit of a big year for children’s movies, making its debut with $103.2 million, the highest opening for an original movie that wasn’t based on prior source material (such as a book or comic).
Because of the high bar set not only by Pixar ( Dory, Inside Out) but also by Disney Animation ( Zootopia) in recent years, just appealing to little kids will get you only so far. Last fall, the monster mashup Hotel Transylvania 2 pulled in a respectable $169.7 million, and The Peanuts Movie turned in a solid $130.2 million, boosted by nostalgia.
But to get record-setting numbers or have a breakout hit these days, studios need to pull in all demographics and incorporate intelligent and sophisticated themes, says Paul Dergarabedian,
senior media analyst for tracking service comScore. Finding Dory, for example, centers on a specialneeds fish, Zootopia explores prejudice, and last year’s Inside
Out focuses on human emotions. (All three met with critical support, with Dory’s 95% “fresh” rating on review aggregate site RottenTomatoes.com being the lowest of the bunch.)
“That seems to be the key right now for these huge openings of these family films — they really do cater to everybody in the family,” says Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. “Like all great myths in Greek mythology, there’s a reason they last. They have themes that are evergreen, and that’s what great animated films tap into.”
Carol Jones, who runs the lifestyle blog All Mommy Wants, has noticed her 6-year-old twins gravitating toward films such as Dory and Zootopia “that are more complex than I watched when I was their age,” she says. “Children’s movies now have a deeper social aspect that my kids have picked up on, and as a parent, I love the conversations they open up.” Dergarabedian sees the first
Shrek movie in 2001 being a watershed moment in that direction: “It had a lot of brainpower wrapped within a seemingly frivolous package.” Similarly, the way
Secret Life utilizes cute critters and taps into humans’ love for their pets makes it a film that “crosses over to everyone,” he says.
Yet kid-friendly fare doesn’t al- ways work, especially in a crowded marketplace. Look at the tanking of sequel Alice Through
the Looking Glass, whose sevenweek $76.1 million total is a pittance of Alice in Wonderland’s boffo $116.1 opening six years ago. Or ask Spielberg, the director who has made some of the most iconic family movies of all time —
E.T., anyone? — but whose adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG has racked up just $38.7 million in two weeks.
For Bock, The BFG was aimed mostly at younger audiences, and it didn’t have enough action or bite for teens and adults. Plus, while Spielberg is huge for their parents, Dory arguably is a bigger deal in a little kid’s world, Dergarabedian says. “That’s where the heart kicks in more than the brain when it comes to family films.”
Pixar makes it look easy, but it’s really not, Dergarabedian says.
“Family audiences have to make a huge commitment in time, resources and money to go out to a theater. You have to have a really compelling reason to get them to do that.”
“Children’s movies now have a deeper social aspect that my kids have picked up on.” Blogger Carol Jones