It's Valentine's Day, and the movie studios have rolled out chick flicks like bouquets for every gal whose husband or boyfriend has ever disappointed them.
Thank goodness. Or so that seems to be the message from female moviegoers who have been lining up for women-enticing movies in droves.
Last year kicked off with the wildly successful "Sex and the City: The Movie" followed by "Mamma Mia!" in the summer and "Twilight" in the fall. The trend continued this year with "He's Just Not That Into You," last weekend's No. 1 movie, followed by this weekend's new female-skewing offering, "Confessions of a Shopaholic." If one includes tween girls phenomena like the "Hannah Montana" concert movie or "High School Musical 3," it's safe to declare that movie studios ignore women at their own peril.
It's certainly a sign of the times when Jerry Bruckheimer, Hollywood's reigning action king, is the prime mover behind "Confessions of a Shopaholic," based on the popular Sophie Kinsella novel. While Bruckheimer has dabbled in female-oriented films before ("Flashdance," "Coyote Ugly"), never has he become so actively engaged in the color pink and all its metaphorical allusions. (Ads for the film show its star, Isla Fisher, looking very pretty in that very color.)
"The only thing that explodes in this movie is her closet," joked Bruckheimer, whose company developed the film for eight years. Fisher plays a screwball finance magazine writer with a frantic passion for shopping and a trunkful of debt -- certainly a topical problem for women and men.
Slowly but surely, the studios seem to be realizing that the much-derided "chick flick" is in fact where the action is these days.
"The movie industry has distinctly underestimated the female audience and their box-office clout for a long time," said box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "I've seen a shift where you have a lot of guys, teen boys, even twentysomethings are playing video games, staying home. Now movies that have innate appeal to women are paying off. Finally Hollywood has cracked the code of what is appealing to women."
A sure sign that the genre has embedded itself deep into the consumer psyche is that these types of movies are becoming critic-proof. Here's what Entertainment Weekly said about "He's Just Not That Into You": "You turn romantic sanity into something so sanitized that it starts to make delusion look good." And many of the reviews for "Sex and the City," "Mamma Mia!" and "Confessions of a Shopaholic" were similarly snarky.
