Identifying The Market

There's been several movies of late that aggressively missed their market.

I say aggressively because it seemed like they were actively alienating the people who would naturally want to see the film.

A good way to spot it will be the director or star talking about whom they made the movie for, and it's not the people who want to see it.

It's often in response to the natural audience expressing reservations about it having something they want to see.

The first inklings of this was centered around Fury Road and the hiring of Eve Ensler and what that would mean about the content of the film.  Rather than tell the damn truth, they inflated her importance to the project and lent strength to the rumors that it'd be all intersectional feminism all the time.  It wasn't.  Thankfully.

Ghostbusters (2016) was the first movie I noticed where the rumors about the content from the natural audience were spot on.  The natural audience for the kind of comedy that the original Ghostbusters was, is not really a woman.

It's male geeks.

Action comedy is a male market.

Add the supernatural element and it becomes a geek market.

Those are the people waiting to pay you to see the film.

Women don't line up to see this kind of movie.  Even if you make a movie like this for them.

Even worse, the women who would be naturally inclined to go to see it, are going to agree with what the boys wanted; so they're not going to like what you've made.

The people the film makers claim to have made the movie for, want a different kind of comedy.

The failure to find an audience willing to pay to see it is not a failure of the audience.  It's a failure of the studio, screenwriter(s), director and actors.

But the studio, screenwriter(s), director and actors sure did blame the audience for its lack of interest, didn't they?  They even assigned motive to the disinterest.  It wasn't that they'd made a movie for a phenomenally small niche; it was that the people whose money they wanted were all sexists.

Dude, if we pasty white male geeks were sexist, explain Wonder Woman.  Explain why Fury Road did well despite the controversy.  There's lots of examples that prove the charge of sexism false.

We're also not racist.  Remember how I said we're the natural audience?  Black Panther's huge numbers wouldn't have happened without us.

What we're being condemned for is knowing what we like, knowing what we don't and not buying what we don't.

We also don't care to be falsely accused of being 'ists.  That will move us from ambivalent to negative in a heartbeat.