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.
A real shocker. There are some people you think will live forever, and Sir Patrick Stewart was one of them. The legendary actor has passed away at the age of 86. We’ve lost one of the greats.