Thanksgiving films chase female audience

By John Horn

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

The best Thanksgiving clash won’t be over who has to sit at the kids’ table. The more interesting battle is Hollywood’s holiday weekend campaign to seize family and female moviegoers — without being undone by the leftovers of the penultimate “Harry Potter” film.

Four movies premiered in wide release Wednesday, double the total from last Thanksgiving weekend: Screen Gems’ musical romance “Burlesque,” 20th Century Fox’s romantic-dramedy “Love & Other Drugs,” Disney’s animated fairy tale “Tangled” and CBS Films’ revenge thriller “Faster.”

Even though the studios are widely (and perhaps rightly) criticized for making few movies aimed at women, their Y-chromosome partiality is not obvious this holiday break. “Burlesque,” “Love & Other Drugs” and “Tangled” are all chasing women as their primary audience. Disney is betting that a lot of moms — and maybe a few dads — will bring their children to its animated retelling of the Rapunzel story. The only new entry aimed squarely at men and older boys is “Faster,” an R-rated action film starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

“There was nothing going after this audience,” Robert Teitel, a producer of “Faster,” says of the decision to schedule the film as counterprogramming. CBS Films hopes that Johnson, a former professional wrestler who has recently been making kiddie fare such as “Tooth Fairy,” “Race to Witch Mountain” and “The Game Plan,” can recapture the patrons who attended his earlier, more violent works, including “The Rundown,” “Walking Tall” and “The Scorpion King.”

“Dwayne has never looked better, and if he is going to come back in the format, you had to bring him back bad — he’s on a total revenge path, and nothing gets in the way to stop him,” Teitel says. “You get behind his character right away.” CBS Films, which has been advertising “Faster” on its sister broadcast network, hopes that women who took their children to Johnson’s PG-rated family films and came to like the actor might turn out for this movie as well.

Early audience-tracking surveys show that none of the Thanksgiving films is likely to top the performance of Warner Bros.’ “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1,” even though “Potter” is now in its second weekend.

Last summer, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” grossed $158 million in its first five days, and $77.8 million in its first three-day weekend. More worrisome to the four new films is that “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” grossed $29.5 million in its second weekend. If the new “Harry Potter” does similar or better second-weekend business, it could very likely claim first place. A year ago, the new wide releases “Old Dogs” and “Ninja Assassin” didn’t come close to challenging holdovers “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” and “The Blind Side” for the top spot.

The film most likely to give “Harry Potter” a run for the money is “Tangled,” Disney’s long-in-the-works animated musical. The movie has gone through a number of iterations, and when the studio’s “The Princess and the Frog” failed to attract many boys to the box office a year ago, “Tangled” received a new title (it was formerly called “Rapunzel”) and more of a rogue-rescues-the-damsel-in-distress story line.

“I totally recognize the challenge” in attracting boys and men to “Tangled,” says Rich Ross, Disney’s studio chief. “It may not be their first choice, but we want them to go along for the ride. The look of the film is as groundbreaking as animation can be today.”

The other movie besides “Harry Potter” that could prove an obstacle to “Tangled” is DreamWorks Animation’s “Megamind,” which was the nation’s most-popular release its first two weeks in theaters.

The Thanksgiving wild card is “Burlesque,” starring Christina Aguilera and Cher. The movie is generating strong early interest from women, with younger women preferring it over “Love & Other Drugs” and “Tangled.”

“We have some really strong competition,” says Steve Antin, the film’s director and writer.