Teens offered 'Submarine' or 'Matched'

By Sarah Sluis

What do teens want? Movies like Twilight roll out and break box-office records, but the formula isn't quite as replicable as, say a blue-chip teen sex/coming-of-age comedy. Today, there's two pickups at each end of the spectrum.

Up at the Toronto Film Festival, the Weinstein Co. picked up Submarine, a teen coming-of-age comedy that had me at "[avoids] the obvious moves of Wes Anderson-inspired preciousness that often sink young filmmakers," according to the LA Times Blog, Submarine sounds like it could have been just such a film, containing such pastiche touches as Super 8 footage and "typeface reminiscent of '60s-era Godard films," with a tone that "establishes an oddball mixture of sincerity, self-consciousness and teen-angst moodiness." But, although another blogger called director Richard Ayoade a "Wes Anderson," it appears the movie goes in a somewhat different direction. The protagonist's main goals involve the more standard concerns: losing his virginity and dealing with parental strife, but it seems like it's done in a classy way with an all-ages appeal. I'm putting this on my to-see list in 2011.

On the epic side of the teen movie game, Disney, which has been pursing franchise films and other "big" filmmaking opportunities, signed on to adapt an unreleased novel (planned as a series) called Matched.

The teen film follows a pretty standard dystopian plotline: a world where the government controls the media and teens are permanently "matched" with someone when they turn eighteen. From this broad description, I'm actually reminded of the wonderful children's book The Giver (stuck in development at Warner Bros.!), which similarly featured a controlled environment. In Matched, a young woman is matched with one man but sees another person's face on the computer screen doing the matching for a brief second. As she develops feelings for the man that is not her "match," she starts to doubt the society that put such a system in place. I won't get my hopes up for a film adaptation yet. Disney also acquired a sci-fi romance series Fallen recently, so it will probably develop a few projects and choose one of the best to move forward into production.

So which project wins? While Submarine sounds like a film I want to see, Matched has an original bent. I'm curious if studios will be able to spin off the success of Twilight into a whole new popular genre. These types of fantasies seem like a pit stop in between Disney princesses and romantic comedies, and they could be the answer to the similarly fantasy-fueled superhero movies that appeal to teen boys.