Following the disastrous performance by many of the summer’s family films, kid-friendly fare has become one of show business’s biggest worries. Once among the easiest audiences to woo (even a shabby release like 1999’s “Pokemon” grossed a robust $85.7 million), young kids are now as elusive as healthy movie snacks. Faced with this massive desertion, studios are either reworking marketing campaigns for completed family films, as is the case with next week’s “Tuck Everlasting,” or reworking the casting for family films just going into production, which is happening with next Christmas’s “Peter Pan.”
The shared goal of the new marketing and production efforts is to lure kids by baiting their parents. That makes sense: grownups ultimately decide not only which movie their tykes can see, but also may fork out $8.50 for their own tickets if they think they, too, would like the show. Trouble is, by appealing to parents so strenuously, filmmakers risk alienating millions of children. And if kids aren’t nagging their folks about needing to see a new family film right now, that movie is almost guaranteed to bomb.
Four months ago, it looked like Hollywood had nothing to worry about. The family films “Lilo & Stitch” and “Scooby-Doo” opened the summer powerfully, and some senior studio executives said at the time they were devoting even more energy to making a bunch of kid flicks. But then the roof fell in, and almost every remaining summer family film was buried. Most notably, “Stuart Little 2,” a better film than its 1999 predecessor, tanked, grossing less than half what the first film did (sequels usually surpass the preceding movie’s box-office take). Worse yet, “Stuart 2” cost a staggering $120 million. That film’s failure stunned not only its makers at Sony but virtually every other producer of family-friendly films.
What happened with “Stuart 2” and the other underachieving family movies? First, there were simply too many family films from which to choose, a lot as middling as “The Powerpuff Girls Movie.” Second, and more important, the definition of family film changed completely: mom and dad started taking their 5-year-olds not to “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” and “Hey Arnold! The Movie” but to “Spider-Man” and “Men in Black 2.” Just like that, the definition of “family film” was transformed–they suddenly got a lot more grown-up.
That surprising audience shift toward racier fare created a conundrum. If you’re a studio executive, do you take tame G-rated fare and spice it up with violence, sex and language? Or do you instead tone down more explicit PG-13 titles so they don’t scare off vigilant parents? Since movies take more than a year to make and market, we won’t know the full answers until next year. But already there are signals, both from movies in production and some that will be released in coming weeks. The producers of a new version of “Peter Pan” due in late 2003 recently cast the part of Tinkerbell, and it was a telling selection. Instead of picking some lily-white Cathy Rigby clone, Sony’s filmmakers selected the French bombshell Ludivine Sagnier (“8 Women”). That should attract a couple of dads. (Curiously, the makers of “Scooby-Doo” did just the opposite. Concerned some double entendres would offend grownups with kids, Warner Bros. asked director Raja Gosnell to recut the film. The film performed so well there will be a sequel in 2004.)
The challenge in courting the entire family to a film is that what may excite one audience segment could be the very thing that repels another. Both “Max Keeble’s Big Move” and “Big Fat Liar” served up a story young kids tend to love: taking revenge on somebody older and more powerful. But payback isn’t necessarily a teaching priority for a lot of parents, many of whom took one look at the advertising materials and said, “Not for my kid.” Both movies, especially “Max Keeble,” were box-office disappointments, and both might have performed better were it not for the parental backlash. On the other hand, if a movie feels like it’s good for you, some Sunday-school sermon on film, young ones aren’t going to beg their folks for ticket money.
So how can a studio steer around this problem? In the case of “Tuck Everlasting,” opening Oct. 11, it concocts dissimilar ad campaigns, essentially peddling the same movie two different ways. To sell the accomplished adaptation of Natalie Babbitt’s popular novel about a fountain of youth, Disney has divided the audience into moms and young girls. Commercials aimed at the “Oprah” crowd emphasize the film’s quality supporting cast of Oscar winners, which includes William Hurt, Sissy Spacek and Ben Kingsley. Spots pitched toward younger “Gilmore Girls” fans will push the film’s romance and its young stars, Alexis Bledell and Jonathan Jackson; the older actors are nowhere to be seen.
Since animated films have long been the family audience’s dominant genre, the creative evolution within the form is revealing. Fearful the audience for animation was growing younger while older kids no longer considered it “cool,” several studios assembled action stories aimed squarely away from rugrats. Yet both “Titan A.E.” and “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” bombed. The next test in this gambit is “Treasure Planet,” loosely adapted from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. The film, opening Nov. 27, features animated stunts taken straight from ESPN’s “X Games” and two rocking ballads from Goo Goo Dolls lead singer Johnny Rzeznik. A music video based on the song “I’m Still Here” will be sent to MTV, and some radio stations are starting to play it. An interesting strategy, as long as mama still dances and daddy still rocks and rolls.
