Trend: Older woman/younger woman movies

By Sarah Sluis

Today in pickup news, Fox announced it will develop 29: A Novel, a soon-to-be-published novel by Adina Halpern. The author's previous novel, The Best Ten Days of My Life, was also picked up by Fox, with Amy Adams attached to star and Shawn Levy to direct. 29 centers on a 75-year-old woman who has employed every means possible to look younger. She wishes to be 29, just for a day, and gets her wish. With the

help of her granddaughter, she has a magical, youthful day, while her own daughter and her similarly aged best friend search for the "missing" woman. This kind of story, let's be clear, is not original. It's a little bit of Freaky Friday, 13 Going On 30, 17 Again, and every other age-reversing tale out there. But instead of someone wanting to be a teenager again (or out of the angst-filled

teen years), the story will target one retirement-age woman and another the age of the young

urban professional. This project continues a trend that's led to box-office success as of late: the pairing a 20 to 30-something actress with a 50+ actress.

2008's Mamma Mia! teamed up Meryl Streep with rising star Amanda Seyfried. Sure, European audiences were drawn in by the ABBA soundtrack, but younger audiences (like myself) came for the younger heroine, but, of course, were charmed by Streep's wonderful performance and fabulous rendition of "Dancing Queen." The movie ended up earning over five times its opening weekend. Streep also filled the position of the older actress in The Devil Wears Prada, which co-starred Anne Hathaway. The movie grossed $125 million, also five times its opening weekend.

Seyfriend repeated the gig of playing opposite an older woman in this May's Letters to Juliet, which teamed her up with Vanessa Redgrave (age 73!). The

movie opened small but quintupled its opening weekend gross over several weeks (making the five-times-opening-weekend formula pretty standard among this genre of films), and generating a tidy profit for Summit.

Last week, I wrote about the development of Mommy & Me, which will pair Streep with Tina Fey, and bring in a wide age range of female audiences. Streep also did this with Julie & Julia, which co-starred thirty-something Amy Adams. Because so many of these old-young movies co-star Streep, it's tempting to attribute it all to her, but this analysis doesn't hold up. Streep's female-centered films that did not include a prominent younger co-star didn't do as well at the box office. It's Complicated also didn't quite achieve the level of success of Streep's films that featured a younger star significantly involved in the plotline. Evening may be the black sheep here, or the exception that proves the rule. The small film that cast Toni Collette and Claire Danes in its "younger" roles, didn't do as well (even though I saw it in theatres, true to form, with my mother and aunt!), perhaps because the younger actresses Collette and Danes were past their twenties and no longer rising stars, or perhaps because the talent roster, which also included older stars Glenn Close and Vanessa Redgrave alongside Streep, was too weighted on the older end of the spectrum.

These younger-older woman stories are perfect for mother-daughter movie dates, but they also seem to attract audiences that are exclusively younger or older. Young audiences have embraced older actresses like Betty White, who was the recipient of a youth-driven, Facebook campaign for her to host "Saturday Night Live" (It worked). Coincidentally, White herself will soon appear as a grandmother in another younger woman/older woman movie, You Again, coming out in September. Kristen Bell plays a woman whose brother is marrying her high school enemy, and it turns out the mothers (50+ actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Sigourney Weaver) also are high school enemies. Of course, Hollywood can only repeat a formula so many times before the audience begins to tire of it, but for now the young-old pairings are the hot way to draw in both female quadrants to the box office.