Tom Beasley takes a look at the most unfairly maligned movie demographic…
How did you react when you saw the first trailer for Book Club? If you’re anything like me, your immediate response was probably a snort of derision, followed by a shaking of the head in disbelief. It seemed baffling that a movie about women in the twilight of their lives – the average of the four leads is 72 – reading Fifty Shades of Grey and subsequently revving up their sex lives was being made and pushed into multiplexes.
I have since seen the film, and it’s an absolute delight. This has led me to reconsider my original reaction to the trailer and consider precisely why the movie seemed like such an improbable and ridiculous prospect. It comes down to a simple prejudice against the target audience for a film like Book Club – an audience that is actually hugely valuable to UK multiplexes today.
Book Club is aimed at the sort of woman who feels as if they could be part of this social group. It’s a movie that thrives on bringing the audience into its world of extravagant white kitchens – Nancy Meyers will be proud – and endless supplies of wine. If Magic Mike XXL perfectly recreated the bawdy atmosphere of a hen night, Book Club replicates an evening in with your girlfriends bitching about men and drinking Merlot from a glass the size of a toddler’s head.
There’s an audience for these type of movies and it’s an audience that’s just as valid as any other. Whether it’s ageism, sexism or just a disdain for the fact these movies are not for teenage boys, we often lose sight of the fact that the ‘grey pound’ is an enormous market in modern cinema, and it’s one that has real purchasing power.
In recent weeks, cosy postwar romance The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society did very solid business as the only major counter-programming to Avengers: Infinity War and recent years have seen the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies do fantastically well off the back of their growing old disgracefully premise. These movies, aimed at older audiences, are real financial successes. Even more importantly, though, they’re often very good.
The prime example of this is The Lady in the Van from 2015, which gave Maggie Smith one of her best late career roles. She’s a cantankerous delight as the elderly woman living on playwright Alan Bennett’s driveway and the movie gets the balance between heart-warming emotion and pithy one-liners exactly right. It opened to a very healthy £2m in the UK and stuck around for months, playing to mostly full screening rooms.
Speaking of mostly full screening rooms, the grandaddy of this world is set to roar back into cinemas next month. Riding the power of the older woman market to sights hitherto unknown, Mamma Mia! was the must-see summer movie of 2008 and nabbed almost £70m at the UK box office. At the time, it was the highest-grossing British film ever in the UK, until Harry Potter and Skyfall flexed their franchise muscles. Indeed, the movie was still in the all-time British top 10 until it was overtaken by Avengers: Infinity War last week.
Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! is set to arrive in cinemas on 20 July and it will be interesting to see how it performs. The dominant teenage boy demographic is well served by Dwayne Johnson actioner Skyscraper and the new Mission: Impossible movie, while the summer holidaying kids will be busy with Incredibles 2. If this new ABBA musical is to succeed, it will be looking to the older women out there.
And it would be foolish to bet against this movie. The thing it will likely have going for it – and this is common to many of the films aimed at this market – is an unpretentious sense of fun. Anyone with a particularly outspoken grandmother in their life knows that older women often have no issues speaking their mind, regardless of what comes out of it, and that’s where these movies thrive. They’re the films where the filter is turned off and the audience gets a glimpse into the experience of a world where all pretension has been thrown out of the window. You don’t have to be a widow in your seventies to understand that.
The key thing to remember is that movies are a broad church and any sort of refreshing diversity should be celebrated. Not every film should be aimed at the same nerd in their late teens or early twenties – with apologies to both myself and the likely readership of this website – and that’s okay. Sometimes, when all of the superhero carnage and sweaty action is a bit too much, there’s something to be said for Mary Steenburgen tap dancing to Meat Loaf or some ageing British actors belting out ABBA songs. I just hope Pierce Brosnan keeps his singing voice to himself this time.
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.
