Does Hollywood hate adults?

Is Hollywood’s business model failing because it’s almost exclusively focused on teenagers and young adults, and largely ignores moviegoers over 30?

 There’s an entire adult demographic out there who would be happy to go to the movies every damn week, if there were something they wanted to see. Generally there isn’t, so they stay home and watch “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Good Wife” and so on.

I have this gnawing suspicion that tentpoles, the majors’ flagship movies, have stopped being the best advertisement for movies. In fact, they may be having the opposite effect.
Today’s tentpoles are to movies what Thanksgiving is to dinner — nice for a special occasion, but not something you’d want to have every week … My colleague Peter Debruge puts it another way. He observes that with so many entertainment options available, tentpoles are designed to overdeliver — to be bigger, louder, longer and longer — just to get people into the multiplex and leave them feeling they got their money’s worth. The resulting movies are as rich and heavy as a super-sized meal at McDonald’s.

Why is it that Hollywood doesn’t get that message? With each passing year, they churn out more and more product that is entirely geared toward teenagers, while simultaneously fretting about how that audience is no longer interested in going to the movies. They spend more and more marketing dollars trying to get the attention of an audience that has an attention deficit, while simultaneously raising admission prices until they have put tickets out of reach for the very audience they are trying to capture.

It’s a symptom of the fact that Hollywood remains trapped in an old, inflexible business model based on Gigantor-size spectacles — in an age when everything else about the culture has gotten more niche-oriented and individualized — but hasn’t yet faced a big enough crisis to force major change.

read article by Andrew O'Hehir