Word: pg
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Does Steven Spielberg tailor his action movies to PG-13 specifications? You bet. His Jurassic Park, with many a rampaging dinosaur and a bit of parenting on the side, skirted the R and strutted to a record B.O. pace of $81.7 million in its first week. Naturally, Universal Pictures' Tom Pollock is ecstatic. He's also pleased to display surveys indicating that only 2% of parents deemed the film too scary for their kids. "We are gearing ourselves toward younger movies," he says. "There's a demographic bulge called the baby boomlet: the baby boomers and their children, ranging from...
...from conviction or calculation, the town is born-again nice. Nearly extinct this summer are the killer thrillers, with their stark violence, sleazy sex, punk vocabulary -- and R ratings. Taking their place is the children's film, in which kids and grownups take reassuring life lessons. At heart these PG movies are After School Specials for the kids, and after-work seminars for dads. It's Father's Day all summer, and the Kidding of America all year long...
Listen, all, to the imaginary testimony of a few summer-movie Dads Anonymous. They sound like Hollywood moguls swearing off R-rated rotgut for the 12-step program of PG uplift...
Hollywood did not need a Body by Jake workout to get its movies into PG shape; it required no Marianne Williamson exhortation to spur it to reunite the nuclear family onscreen. The industry simply looked at the numbers. Family movies can be made cheaply and can reap deeply. "In addition to selling the ticket to the young child," says producer Scott Rudin (The Addams Family, Sister Act, Searching for Bobby Fischer), "you also sell tickets to five of his friends and three of their parents. For the same marketing dollar, the quantity of purchase is much higher. And kids...
...lines: a boy, fatherless or momentarily so, goes on a quest, defends his turf and befriends an older man. It is no surprise that the sires of these films have been the New Hollywood's surest swamis: Spielberg, George Lucas and John Hughes. Home Alone alone stoked the current PG trend. "You could say it helped expose the sheer size of this market," Hughes says modestly. It cost $18 million and grossed $285 million in North America. And box office is just the beginning. Certain G or PG films -- Disney cartoons, for example -- can make zillions more in the video...