Friday, September 5, 2014







Women Are the Successes of the Summer Box Office

Contributor

As the fall season kicks off with the big festivals (I am currently in Toronto), it is important to take stock of the summer season that just ended.
According to most box-office reports and reporters, Summer 2014 was a big disaster.  Box-office totals were at $4.05 billion, down 14.6 percent from 2013 — an embarrassing eight-year low. Big studio stars like Tom Cruise flopped (even though his action film, Edge of Tomorrow, got some great reviews), and the reunion of 80s movie stars in The Expendables 3 was DOA.
But there was a bright spot in this grim mess: the women. This should give Hollywood some hope as it plans for the future, since, according to a NY Times piece, recent women’s successes at the box office are causing Hollywood to rethink its “conventional wisdom” that movies starring women are box-office poison. (I’ll believe that when I see it.)

Here are some of the summer’s success stories:



Angelina Jolie

Sometimes I don’t think she’s a mere mortal. She had the biggest movie of her career, Maleficent, which is at $238 million domestically and $748 million worldwide and managed to give the film a strong feminist message. Jolie’s fall and winter will be just as big as she prepares her sophomore directing effort, Unbroken, which is also generating Oscar buzz, and her third film, co-starring her husband Brad Pitt.

read the rest at forbes













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