Rating high on Hollywood’s list: immature audiences

[Grubert]

Link

If 2009 is remembered for anything in American cinema, it might be as the year grown-ups and Hollywood finally agreed to call it quits.

This is the year when such slick, star-driven, adult-oriented movies as State of Play, Duplicity, The International and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 underperformed at the box office. And when talking-toy movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra raked in millions.

Suddenly, movies for grown-ups are in the cross hairs. “I’m caught up all in it,” Spike Lee said recently with a rueful laugh, noting that the sequel to his 2006 thriller Inside Man is hanging in the balance. “I’m waiting on Universal,” he said.

[...]

Last week Universal cochairman Marc Shmuger told the Los Angeles Times that 2009 “has certainly been a humbling year. First, there’s a real need to be making movies for less money. Second, there’s a real premium on sharper, more marketable concepts. Audiences are clearly seeking escape from their lives.”

Translation: Hello, Paul Blart. Sayonara, Frost/Nixon.

[...]

This is affecting even the biggest names and projects. Scorsese's Shutter Island got pushed to 2010 and one studio source told Nikki Finke that the hardest hit segment has been movies that play to an older adult audience.