The most discussed box office story of the summer was the enormous success of The Dark Knight, the Batman movie that, we were told incessantly, has made more money than any film in history besides Titanic.
Only, in point of fact, it hasn’t. The only honest way to compare the grosses of The Dark Knight with those of past blockbusters is to measure them in constant dollars. By that standard, The Dark Knight‘s $500 million in domestic box office places it a mere 29th on the all-time box office list; it is bested, surprisingly, by movies like The Sting, Thunderball, and Grease. (Using this method of measurement, by the way, Titanic is only the sixth most popular film of all time; Gone with the Wind actually tops the list with earnings of $1.4 billion in 2008 dollars, followed by Star Wars, The Sound of Music, E.T., and, of all things, The Ten Commandments.)
In the end, then, The Dark Knight really isn’t all that meaningful a cultural phenomenon; it is merely the latest in a series of profitable comic-book movies, following in the wake of the three Spider-Man pictures. Nonetheless, it is The Dark Knight that has been the subject of dozens of breathless works of illiterate financial analysis, while the most culturally meaningful and interesting trend of the summer has gone undiscussed.
Two movies released in the past few months have actually earned more as a return on investment than The Dark Knight or any other film this year. They are Sex and the City and Mamma Mia! and they are not movies aimed at the supposedly golden audience of young males between the ages of 12 and 34. These are films about women either approaching middle age or smack-dab in the grip of it, and the only way a teenage boy would have seen even a minute of them is if he took a wrong turn in the multiplex lobby after a trip to the bathroom.
Mamma Mia! has earned $140 million in the United States, and will probably finish its run in the theaters with an overall gross of $160-$175 million. Even more impressive, its worldwide gross is $300 million. So, by the time it hits DVD, it will have made somewhere around $550 million, or 10 times its production cost of $52 million. By contrast, The Dark Knight will earn $1 billion worldwide, dwarfing Mamma Mia! Except that The Dark Knight cost just shy of $200 million, which means that it will have earned five times its production cost. Strictly as a matter of return on investment, Mamma Mia! will prove to be one of the most profitable movies ever made.
Sex and the City has brought in $150 million here at home and $240 million internationally so far, and will top out over $400 million total. That is seven times its production cost of $65 million, which means it is not as dramatic a success as Mamma Mia! but still a colossal triumph.
Both movies, to be sure, came with ready-made audiences. Sex and the City was based on a popular television series, while Mamma Mia! is the film version of a phenomenally successful stage show featuring songs by the 1970s Swedish pop band ABBA and a plotline lifted baldly from the 1968 comedy Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell. Most movies deriving from TV programs have failed over the past decade, most recently an X-Files film that cost $30 million and has made, worldwide, a grand total of $29 million. The only adaptation of a Broadway musical to score even modest success in the past five years is Hairspray; most others have done disastrously, as was the case with Rent, The Producers, and Phantom of the Opera (which, like MM!, was already a worldwide brand when it was brought to the screen).
No, what is notable, and important, about these two profoundly forgettable and unimportant films is that they are an unmistakable indication of a market-altering fact: Women, particularly women above the teenage years, are motion-picture ticket buyers, and if movies are made for them, they will make studios and producers rich beyond their wildest dreams.
For decades, Hollywood has resisted this idea. Marketing executives believe that, while women will agree to attend the films their boyfriends and husbands want to see, men will not return the favor. Therefore, a movie made and marketed to males has a decent chance of getting females in the seats, while a movie made for women will be bereft of a male audience. And since, it has long been believed, women will not go to movies on their own and without a significant other, the financial deck is stacked against them.
Most of this wisdom is demonstrably true. But there is a new wrinkle. Just as teenage boys will travel in a pack on opening night to see The Dark Knight, and return in yet another pack again and again, women in their thirties, forties, and fifties are showing similar tendencies with movies that appeal to them. They don’t form a pack; it’s more like a book club outing.
I hated Sex and the City and loved Mamma Mia! to distraction–it’s like a menopausal Beach Blanket Bingo with Meryl Streep instead of Annette Funicello. To call these movies fluff is to insult the Fluffernutter. But the knowledge, to which Hollywood must surely and at last be opening itself, that movies made for women are a decent bet, is a welcome development for anyone who thinks films should have a plot and tell a story that remotely resembles real life.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
