One could say that any title with the name “Margaret” in it is bound to fail, but this weekend’s box-office bombing of Kelly Fremon Craig’s “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret” is more than that.
Its tepid box-office performance doesn’t really need any in-depth investigation, such as what Deadline has just done. It’s quite simple, really. Despite the rave reviews — 86 on Metacritic — the film is very much geared towards teenage girls.
‘Margaret’ grossed $6 million dollars this weekend, 55% of the audience were older Caucasian women. In a business dominated by male moviegoers, it never was going to make much money with those numbers.
This isn’t a case of a film made for adults, yet again, failing to draw an audience. ‘Margaret’ isn’t for adults. The Judy Blume book it’s based on is geared towards a very specific female-centric demo.
It seems, as though the mature female demo that did show up to watch it this weekend did so out of a sense of nostalgia. They most probably read the book when they were younger teens. However, the biggest problem ‘Margaret’ had was that only 6% of tickets sold were from girls between the ages of 12-14 — which is the book’s key demo.
The book and film can be described as a “teenage girl rite of passage”. It has these heavy young female topics, i.e. menstruation, boys, first bras — not exactly the type of movie to pull in mass audiences.
In my review of the film I admitted that I wasn’t the target audience for it and a quick glance at the critics who reviewed it shows that the majority of submitted reviews were from female critics — 27 of the 40 counted on Metacritic.
And so, it ends up being that ‘Margaret’ might build a cultish fanbase in the years to come, but it had no discerning pull for audiences to go out of their way and watch the trials and tribulations of a pre-pubescent girl.
Thatcher shows up on-screen for, at most, 10 seconds. She looks remarkably like Thatcher and comes off as almost too polished, non-human like. Further clues are pointing at AI.