I daughter says that none of her friends care at all about seeing the DS movie. They says it looks silly.
That's very interesting and somewhat telling about the "target audience." Of course, I found all the references to 1972 (from lava lamps to
Deliverance playing at the local theater and everything else inbetween [how I love that old TV console set and the Carpenters performing on it]) to be not only nostalgic, but funny. Back then, when we "oldsters" were growing up, those were the times of our lives and we can appreciate (I, and several friends, snuck into
Deliverance even though we were under-age), do the teens and tweens of today have any understanding? I know for a fact they do not. I've worked as a history teacher for years, and now do it as a substitute teacher (along with being an adaptive aquatics instructor for special needs kids, neither of which jobs pays anything), and I can tell you that teens and tweens are curious in the classroom when I explain what it was like back then, but they consider it "weird" and not worth more than a quick story. They have no connection with it and don't care about it, unlike we teens in the early seventies who got a kick out of
American Graffiti. We packed the theater for that one and bought the soundtrack record (record? - what's that?) set and had sock-hop-revival dances in our schools. What once was fascinated us. It no longer does for "today's generation." I can tell you that as a current substitute teacher.
I think the whole movie industry, wanting to target the "under 49" crowd really has it wrong. The under-49 crowd (apologies to those here under 49, and you know I'm making a generalization the way Hollywood does - the Hollywood crowd sure just say what it means: teens and tweens) is only concerned about the here and now, about what's "trending." And now what's "trending" is even shorter than the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. By the time the last one receives a message via "tweeting," what's been tweeting about is old news. It's so March 2012.
That's why it amazes me that folk over 49 were kept out of the advanced screenings. We've already got a group of over 20 who plan on having a weekend DS movie extravaganza, complete with a party and going en-masse to the movie. The average age in the group is 55. The oldest is 72. We have only two who are under 49 - one is 48, the other is young whipper-snapper at 38. More than half have never or rarely experienced DS, but because of the trailer, they can't wait to see it. Like I said in previous posts, the trailer has given them a huge interest in the series which many loathed before. And most of us lived and experienced the '70's. We're looking forward to experiencing it again (along with Barnabas and Angelique and Elizabeth, et. al.). But teens and tweens today? It's all about the awful
Twilight series (set in the today) and the film version of
The Hunger Games (adapted, in a very good way, from an excellent popular novel series). But by tomorrow, they'll be onto something else. Teens and tweens, from my current experience, are fickle. They want the
now. And for Hollywood, that's a dangerous "trending" thing to follow. This weekend's box-office dynamite can and will turn into next weekend's bomb.
Gerard