Dear Studios: Seriously, Put More Kids’ Movies in Theaters!
Plus: A punchy assignment!
Before we get started, I just want to highlight a very cool chat I had this week with Lou Diamond Phillips about his new film Keep Quiet, which is playing at the Dallas International Film Festival on Saturday. I think there are still a handful of tickets, so if you’re around, you should check it out. As he put it in our talk, it’s “Training Day on the Rez.” A key example of a burgeoning film movement we might think of as Native Noir, Keep Quiet is a taut little thriller that is both specific to a place and a people and universal in its themes.
If you’re not in Dallas, I hope you check it out when it hits theaters later this year: July 10 is the official date. Don’t worry: I’ll make sure to drop a reminder.
THE RINGER’S SEAN FENNESSEY DEBUTED his new newsletter (you should subscribe!) with a nice effort to try and understand why it feels like there’s more energy and excitement around the movies than there has been in some time. His point about the paucity of kids’ movies jumped out at me:
I took my daughter to see Hoppers and GOAT in successive weekends. We had a ball with both movies. Two weeks after we saw Hoppers, out of nowhere, she plaintively asked me “Why did that girl become a beaver?” This led to an interesting exchange about how to save the environment and if we are doomed. This is called imprinting. These two movies were released three weeks apart. Neither one was wounded by the other. One featured a male lead, the other a female lead. One was about animals playing a form of basketball called “roarball.” The other is about an ecologically-minded girl coping with anxiety by entering her consciousness into an animatronic beaver. Weird stuff in both cases. They’re both original! Kids love these movies, they’re both among the top five of the year at the box office. Perhaps this is my theater-poisoned mind speaking, but why are there not 4-7 new kids features coming from every studio every year?
This is a point the Entertainment Strategy Guy also highlighted in his epic post about the biggest films of the year:
The obvious takeaway: audiences love family films and animated films; The Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch and Zootopia 2 took the top three spots. … A few years ago, I read countless think pieces about horror films, but I was one of the only people arguing for more family films and complaining about the long dry spells between family films coming to theaters.
Two years ago I was arguing much the same point. If anything, things have gotten more dire, the success of Super Mario Galaxy and Hoppers aside. It just feels like we go incredibly long stretches without a darn thing for kids to watch, and we’re about to hit another such stretch. I guess The Mandalorian and Grogu counts as a kids’ film, kinda? That’ll be out next month. But we won’t get another proper animated film for the whole family until more than midway through June, with Toy Story 5, and a few weeks later with the upcoming Minions movie.
Set aside my own desire for an easy afternoon out with the kids. (I’m a lazy dad, I’m happy to outsource the family entertainment to a giant, domineering screen.) For the sake of the industry as a whole, you need to get kids back in the habit of getting excited to go to the theater or risk losing an entire generation to the tiny screens that will serve as the villain of Toy Story 5.
The good news is that Gen Z craves the movie theater mines: It is the demographic most likely to go to the theaters. Now, part of this is just common sense, as they’re right in the midst of the demo that’s long been most coveted by theater owners, the 13-to-25 set. But it demonstrates that for all the talk about Gen Z as the first demographic of digital natives, for all the worrying about them being addicted to short-form video and other phone-friendly formats, the link hasn’t been severed yet.
The benefits of encouraging theatergoing are palpable beyond simple grosses. Consider the impact of trailers on the big screen compared to your laptop: Seeing them in theaters leads to a surprise factor, a wow effect. “In the old days, a trailer would ‘occur’ to you when you sat down in your seat. You didn’t know what you were going to see. You didn’t click, ‘Oh, Mario,’ right? It would occur. It would reveal itself. And there’s something magical about that. So I would agree that we want to retain that magic,” Universal marketing chief Dwight Caines said on a panel at Variety’s Entertainment Marketing Summit earlier this week.
Again, I can only point to my own experiences, and my own experience involves my kids seeing a trailer and immediately asking to see the film, an impulse reinforced every time they see a poster outside of my local Drafthouse or a billboard on the side of the highway. If you build it, my kids will come. And I’m sure they’re not the only ones.
‘Quite honestly, I was disgusted’
AS Y’ALL KNOW, I’ve been kind of bummed to watch the destruction of the Kennedy Center at the hands of the Trump administration. Which is one reason I was glad to talk to whistleblower Josef Palermo, who saw the malfeasance from the inside. It’s just an infuriating story and I hope you give it a watch or a listen.
Michael Review
APPARENTLY, MICHAEL JACKSON STANS—a real thing that exists in the Year of our Lord 2026—are up in arms because critics aren’t swooning over the new film about the pop star that completely ignores the accusations of child abuse leveled at the singer of “Billie Jean” in the 1980s. I’m sure they’ll love my review, which opens with a comparison to Soviet propaganda documentaries.
As historian Thomas Doherty notes in his new book on documentaries drawn from newsreels, How Film Became History, cinema, at least until the rise of algorithmic social media, was the ultimate propagandist’s tool. In early Soviet Russia, for instance, “footage from the recent past was collected to teach Revolutionary doctrine, to deify Lenin (and later Stalin), and to tell, and retell, the Bolshevik origin story. The archival instinct merged with the totalitarian impulse to rewrite and recast the past to suit the ideological needs of the present.”
Understanding the ability of present filmmakers to rewrite (or erase) sins of the past is paramount to understanding why Michael exists in the form audiences will see it in.
Read the whole thing here.
Assigned Viewing: Bang Bang (Kanopy, Paramount+)
THIS IS A 2024 FILM from Vincent Grashaw, the director of Keep Quiet. Tim Blake Nelson plays a boxer nicknamed Bang Bang who decides to train his estranged grandson in the family business, which leads to a bunch of old tensions coming to the surface. It’s an odd movie—there are some script issues; we kind of bounce around all over the place—but it a.) looks great, Grashaw has a keen eye and frames his shots really well; b.) is nicely paced; and c.) gives Nelson space to do some real work. He’s the sort of actor who always gets put in supporting parts, so it’s worth 100 minutes of your time just to see him show off why he’s such a reliable supporting actor.
it's way cheaper than taking them skiing
Definitely need more kids films. When I take my 10 year old twin granddaughters to the movies after school, it is a hunt to find more than 1 choice and we live in the Phoenix Metro area. You can certainly have great stories, and fantastic audio and video without scaring the wits out of kids, and without a crash course in human anatomy. So my granddaughters have put most of their video time into streaming where there are legitimate choices. Sad.