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.

[Secretagentnumber6]

I blame it on the theaters and not on audiences. Many adults find theater to be an experience that is just plain not worth it anymore. You pay 10 or more dollars to see a movie, and end up with people talking and cell phones ringing and texting constantly. Theaters have slowly driven away older mature people in favor of a younger immature and inconsiderate crowd of tweens and people who do not go out enough to know how to behave. It is despicable the state of theater going these days.

[iori]

That is sad.

[Foggy]

I think its the fact that, children go watch films like transformers 2 with they're parents but they don't want to watch films like public eneimes, thats one of the main reasons unversial have been flopping this summer, most of there films where taylored to adults and never really clean for kids.

[EricJ]

...Thank you, Another Media Column--

Are we movie fans the ONLY ones who know that we hated Transformers 2?
Or at least, in the best scenario, come of out GI Joe saying "Now that was what a Transformers 1 sequel should have been"?
(Did word not get out, somehow? )

[Q?]

Originally Posted by Secretagentnumber6

I blame it on the theaters and not on audiences. Many adults find theater to be an experience that is just plain not worth it anymore. You pay 10 or more dollars to see a movie, and end up with people talking and cell phones ringing and texting constantly. Theaters have slowly driven away older mature people in favor of a younger immature and inconsiderate crowd of tweens and people who do not go out enough to know how to behave. It is despicable the state of theater going these days.

They should have one of those "phone blockers" in the theaters, sorry not sure what they're called.

[Rob71]

Originally Posted by Secretagentnumber6

I blame it on the theaters and not on audiences. Many adults find theater to be an experience that is just plain not worth it anymore. You pay 10 or more dollars to see a movie, and end up with people talking and cell phones ringing and texting constantly. Theaters have slowly driven away older mature people in favor of a younger immature and inconsiderate crowd of tweens and people who do not go out enough to know how to behave. It is despicable the state of theater going these days.

It's not just theaters. Grab a Coke and sit on one of the benches in a mall and just watch people. I routinely see behavior that would have gotten me slapped as a kid. And that's coming from the 20 yr olds.

[kpkelley]

Maybe they should just focus on making good movies for adults. Duplicity was not good and Taking of Pelham 123 was a poor remake of a much better film. Adult audiences won't be as easily fooled as the twelve year olds who go to see G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra three times.

[fatediesel]

Originally Posted by Q!

They should have one of those "phone blockers" in the theaters, sorry not sure what they're called.

Yeah, for the most part phone blockers (or jammers as they are more commonly known) are illegal, and they would definitely be illegal in a theater, but I agree it'd be great to go to the movies and not have cell phones going off and people talking during the movies.

[Secretagentnumber6]

Originally Posted by Q!

They should have one of those "phone blockers" in the theaters, sorry not sure what they're called.

Unfortunately Cell Phone Jammers are illegal in the US. Concrete is able to block signals but unfortunately the amount of money it would take to build theatres with 4 foot thick concrete walls is not feasible.

Originally Posted by Rob71

It's not just theaters. Grab a Coke and sit on one of the benches in a mall and just watch people. I routinely see behavior that would have gotten me slapped as a kid. And that's coming from the 20 yr olds.

Yes it is crazy the way some people act. It is as if they have never been out in public before.

[Clark Kent]

The target audience for so-called adult movies is moving more and more to home viewing options. That is why Hollywood is so desperate to get 3-D off the ground, to attract viewers back to theaters who have given up on the theater experience.

[Weirded Wonder]

Originally Posted by Secretagentnumber6

You pay 10 or more dollars to see a movie, and end up with people talking and cell phones ringing and texting constantly. Theaters have slowly driven away older mature people in favor of a younger immature and inconsiderate crowd of tweens and people who do not go out enough to know how to behave. It is despicable the state of theater going these days.

This is the very reason our family has stopped going to the movies. It is no longer a fun experience where you sit with an audience and enjoy. It seems there are people that go to the movies to see if they can compete for attention with what is on screen. I've gone out to complain many times to managers who do nothing and simply tell me to ignore them. I think they're more afraid to do anything because they might be slapped with a discrimination lawsuit. That's the world we live in today.

It's not just younger people or a certain demographic that is ruining my movie going experience, many older people are becoming the inconsiderate ones too.

[Q?]

Originally Posted by fatediesel

Yeah, for the most part phone blockers (or jammers as they are more commonly known) are illegal, and they would definitely be illegal in a theater, but I agree it'd be great to go to the movies and not have cell phones going off and people talking during the movies.

I went in to see Terminator Salvation this summer and this guy went in and sat next to me. 20 MINUTES IN. At first I thought it was a little odd, but whatever. Then he started texting while the light was shining in my face, after a while I did something I never dared too do.
I looked straight in his face with a facial expression borderlining on "I will kill you" look and with a tone that suggested "are you stupid?" and asked him to turn his damn phone off. I just don't get it, how can you go in to watch a movie and not paying attention?
I think there's a whole new generation with ADD, your attention span is too short for reading large bits of news, where twitter is popular and facebook with short status updates.
And all of these succesful films that don't require much attention and thinking.

[Q?]

Originally Posted by Secretagentnumber6

Unfortunately Cell Phone Jammers are illegal in the US. Concrete is able to block signals but unfortunately the amount of money it would take to build theatres with 4 foot thick concrete walls is not feasible.

bummer
Theatres should be allowed to do so, even if they could I don't think they would!? They're still making money...

[Sponge-worthy]

Originally Posted by Q!

I think there's a whole new generation with ADD, your attention span is too short for reading large bits of news, where twitter is popular and facebook with short status updates.
And all of these succesful films that don't require much attention and thinking.

They call it "Generation Screen": People who need to be interacting with some sort of electronic device at all times. For instance, a few weeks back I was at lunch with some co-workers. At the table next to us, a family (presumably) was dining--parents and two high-school-aged daughters. I had a pretty good view of them from where I was sitting. Throughout their entire meal, the two girls were glued to their cell phones. They almost never looked up from the devices. The family never seemed to bond or have any conversation during their meal. It was just a weird thing to see--why not just stay home then? It was a relatively pricey place to eat.

As for cell phone jammers being illegal, if the film/theater industries really wanted an exception, Congress would give it to them. The bigger question is whether that PG-13 age group would rather stay home themselves and pirate movies than have their precious phones rendered unusable for a couple of hours.

[kpkelley]

Your co-workers didn't find it odd that you were staring at two high school girls through lunch?

[assydingo]

Originally Posted by kpkelley

Your co-workers didn't find it odd that you were staring at two high school girls through lunch?

He was doing research.

Some guy was talking during the entire time I watched Orphan. I was able to ignore him but my friend looked like he wanted to punch the guy's face the whole time.

[fatediesel]

Originally Posted by ryan69969

As for cell phone jammers being illegal, if the film/theater industries really wanted an exception, Congress would give it to them.

Exceptions have been denied to churches and schools, so I highly doubt they would give an exception to movie theaters. In addition it's the FCC that handles cell phone jammers, and right now the only people that can legally use them are select law enforcement and military. If they started trying to let certain places use jammers the cell phone industry would immediately sue.
I bet theaters wouldn't use jammers even if they were legal. They know they'd lose much of their teen audience if they had no way of communicating with the outside world for 90 minutes.

[Sponge-worthy]

Originally Posted by kpkelley

Your co-workers didn't find it odd that you were staring at two high school girls through lunch?

I never said I was staring, but as the lunch went along I did get somewhat more and more fascinated by just how glued to their devices the girls were. I wasn't the only one in my party who noticed them, though. Afterward, one of my co-workers said that is exactly why she's hesitant to get her own kid a cell phone.

[EricJ]

Originally Posted by Rob71

Ehh, everything's gotta be faster and better--
Whyyy, in my day, we didn't have nonna these Michael Bay Transformers...We had SLIDE SHOW effects! They'd cut away to somebody saying "Lookit that robot", and then they'd show a slide of one robot hittin' another!
And they didn't even have CGI effects back then, they had to build 'em, out of paper clips and glue...And you looked at the shot and said, "Oh, look there's one paper clip hittin' another, hope he doesn't he doesn't get glue all over him!"
Now we got so many movies, they gotta build 12-screen cineplexes...Whyyy, in my day, we only had ONE screen!...And a movie would play there for three years! And the lines would be six miles long, and we'd go there every year to see the same movie--'Cause it took you the whole year to get to the head of the line, but it was okay, 'cause you knew it be the same movie when you got there, so you could sit and watch a slide show of paper clips hittin' each other!..

(Let it never be said that Dana Carvey wasn't capable of at least one classic bit of SNL history. )