June 10, 2005
Have you seen any good G-rated movies lately?
Apparently a lot of people have.
A new report released yesterday shows that family-friendly films are more profitable than R-rated movies.
The survey was commissioned by the Dove foundation, a Christian organization based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The study is a follow-up to a 10-year study commissioned by the foundation in 1999, which found that between 1988 and 1997, the average G-rated film made eight times the profit of an R-rated picture.
Given this information, why do so many studios to make as many R and PG-13 pictures as they do?
The answer, as Michael Medved has noted, is that it gives the studio bosses a sense of their lost youth.
They make what they like to watch, not what the public wants.
They prefer the praise of their peers, it seems, even more than the profits which go with kinder films.
This isn't the first survey of its kind to show that raunch isn't selling like it used to and that good films are.
Maybe the stockholders in these movie companies will get the message even when the executives are not.
I'm Cal Thomas in New York.
Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C. Watch his television show, After Hours with Cal Thomas, on the Fox News Channel, Saturdays at 11 p.m. Eastern Time.
