Something strange is happening at the box office this summer. Something very strange. The thought first crossed my mind when The Proposal charted at number one because, hell, that would be strange at any time of year, but is even more so when it comes out and dominates during a season that's supposed to be all about things going boom and pandering to bored teenage minds. 'Cause there ain't no teenagers going to see Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds make kissy faces at each other.
But then things became even stranger when I realized that there were certain weird parallels between The Proposal and the surprise champ of the previous two weeks, The Hangover. Both are comedies built around actors without big name pulling power -- that's obvious -- but there's something a little more interesting going on, I think.
To test my theory, I then went back and checked the box office champs for the past several weeks and, damn! I think I might actually be on to something. Here's the list of Box office champs for the summer season so far, in reverse order:
The Proposal
The Hangover
The Hangover
Up
Night at The Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Angels and Demons
Star Trek
X Men Origins: Wolverine
Do you see it? You have to go all the way back to Star Trek before you get a single champ that is targeted at the 15 - 24 age bracket, the bracket that is normally the bread and butter of the summer movie industry. And of the movies targeted at that age range it appears that only Trek is going to make it's money back at the domestic box office; Wolverine, Terminator and the rest will have to rely on the rest of the world and DVD sales to make up some pretty significant shortfalls.
So, what's happening? The thing with numbers like this is that the sample is way too small to make any sort of definitive claims and the smart betting money is certainly that the new Transformers film is going to dominate and end the trend, but it's fun to speculate anyway. Are the big summer films tanking because they're just not very good? Have tastes changed? I'd say no to both, purely because people always have and always will enjoy seeing things go boom on the big screen and a certain type of bad film has never had trouble making money. No, I think what's happening can be traced back, at least in part, to BitTorrent and illegal downloading.
I don't necessarily mean that people were downloading these movies in particular - though they very definitely were downloading Wolverine in mass numbers well before it released - but more that the arrival of mass downloaded media has changed the way an entire generation approaches media and entertainment. For a large sector - once a very lucrative sector - the theater is no longer a necessary experience. So what movies win out? The ones targeted to those either too old to have bought into the whole downloading craze or so young that their viewing habits are still dictated to them by aforementioned old people. Thus, films targeted at adults and small children top the box office. And guess what that means? It means that Hollywood - where hordes of people are employed purely to track and predict trends like this - is going to be making a whole lot more of those films in the near future and a whole lot less big, expensive, aimed-at-teens films in the process.