Hollywood 'Shocker': Women Go To Movies

It's easier to make movies for The Wall. ''Surprise'' hits like Sex and the City may be remarkably profitable since they're often cheap to make, but the industry and much of the punditocracy still condescend to them: Those gals from the office, running off to their little movie, well, let 'em have their hen party. Or they're simply dismissive: Whoa! What was that? Fifty-seven million dollars in three days? Just a little speed bump, nothing to see here, one-of-a-kind situation, how nice for them, let's just keep moving and not look back.

If they did look back, they might see something unsettling: Those ''niches'' are pretty big. And The Wall isn't what it used to be.

Here's a genuinely surprising piece of news about the summer of 2008: In a season expressly designed to appeal to the hordes of kids who are out of school, two of the kiddiest movies so far, Speed Racer and Prince Caspian, have fizzled. And next summer, and for several summers to come, there'll be fewer kids going to the movies, because there'll be fewer kids, period. Apparently (this is the U.S. Census talking), we had a mini-baby boom between about 1981 and 1995. And then came a dip — a substantial dip — in the kid population. In other words, that mammoth group of youngsters that has reliably fueled movie grosses for almost 15 years is now looking less kidlike: They're between 13 and 27. And getting older. And looking for movies that appeal to them. And they're really not going to like being called a niche.

In the mid-1960s, when Hollywood was aiming its films squarely at middle-aged white people, they commissioned a couple of studies to see just who was actually going to the movies. The answer was a bombshell: Nearly half the audience was under 25, and nearly a third, in major cities, was African-American. It took a few years and a handful of blockbusters for the movies themselves to change in response, but they did, to their great profit. Given the old Mark Twain maxim that history doesn't repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes, in 2008 can Hollywood executives once again look at America and say, ''There's an audience out there that we're not serving, and they're hungry''? If not, perhaps they can at least glance in the mirror and realize how silly that expression of permanent surprise is starting to look.