‘Pitch Perfect 2’ leaves ‘Mad Max’ in the dust
“Pitch Perfect 2” made $69 million in U.S. movie theaters over the weekend, beating the action film” Mad Max: Fury Road.”
“This was a huge surprise, I mean earth-shaking,” says marketing strategist Peter Sealey, who was the head of marketing at Columbia Pictures in the 1980s.
The movie, about a group of young women in a singing competition, trounced the big summer action movie, which traditionally attracts a male-skewing demographic.
That demographic, boys and young men under 25, is what studios have traditional gone after, says Sealey. “It’s just, you know, kind of a knee-jerk reaction.”
But the 75 percent female audience that carried “Pitch Perfect 2” is evidence that the paradigm is shifting, says box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of Rentrak.
“We have a lot of movies that we’re seeing where women are driving the story. That they’re the center of these movies. And, we’re going to see more of that,” Dergarabedian says, pointing to recent films such as the “Twilight” series, “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “Cinderella.”
But Pitch Perfect hasn’t been just a female-centric franchise. The first film, which was released in the fall of 2012, has attracted a broad audience on home video.
“And I have to say, when adult straight men say that they loved the movie, I find that extremely satisfying,” Kay Cannon, the films’ screenwriter, told Marketplace in an earlier interview.
“Often, there’s a big preamble before: My wife made me watch it, none of the other channels on the television worked, I couldn’t find the remote,” says Cannon.
To reduce the need for a preamble this time around, Universal Pictures marketed the film broadly, even during the Super Bowl.
“Over time . . . given all those marketing efforts,” says Dergarabedian, the film “could build more of a male audience” than the audience in its opening weekend.
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