Family fare has been doing surprisingly well in recent months. The family fare lineup from November through late June proves this true -- Monsters, Inc. (smash), Harry Potter (smash), Jimmy Neutron (broke even), Snow Dogs (broke even), Big Fat Liar (hit), Return to Neverland (broke even), Ice Age (smash), Clockstoppers (stiff), Spirit (stiff), Scooby-Doo (hit), Lilo & Stitch (hit). Not to mention non-family fare with kid appeal: E.T. (flop), The Rookie (hit), The Scorpion King (broke even), Spider-Man (biggest smash of the year), Men in Black 2 (likely will break even). And the summer isn't over yet -- there's a family-friendly picture every week for the next 5 weeks.

Now the family fare has hit a rough spot. Hey Arnold! and The Powerpuff Girls are tanking. Like Mike is doing OK in cities but not in suburbs/rural areas.

My regular theater, the Reading Cinemas in Manville NJ, loads up on family fare and usually does well with it. This weekend it didn't do well due to product quality and the Fourth of July.

But films like "Harry Potter" make up a very small minority of film relases overall. I'll see regular live-action family oriented films come and go with very little support. "Hey Arnold" is not a bad film, but it just isn't getting well supported even though it is an animated film.

Probably the most ridiculous thing is how the Carmike 8 theater here in Lawton will actually book and play a religious oriented independent film and hardly anyone from all these church groups even shows up at all to support it. These are the same people complaining about all the PG-13 and R rated films. And yet when something live-action and G-rated plays, people stay away in droves.

A good example would be David Lynch's "The Straight Story." I have to say this G-rated movie is quite arguably one of the best films made in the past few years. The late Richard Farnsworth put in a great performance. But was this movie a hit? Nope.

I just think it is pretty typical of many Americans to whine and gripe about a problem and then actually contribute to that problem. It is like they have one standard of right and wrong for the general public and then a completely different standard for themselves. This is a very generalized observation about our culture on the whole, but I do think it lends itself to some of the hypocrisy happening in what kinds of movies Hollywood produces.

We're in the middle of a 9-week cycle with at least one new family-friendly title every week. This cycle began with Scooby-Doo on 6/14 and ends with Spy Kids 2 on 8/7.

Bobby: Disney handled The Straight Story as an arthouse release.

1. Spiderman ($395M)
2. Lord of the Rings ($312M)
3. SW: Ep2 ($286M)
4. Ice Age ($175M)
5. Scooby Doo ($124M)
8. Lilo & Stitch ($77M)
9. The Rookie ($74M)

Now not all of these are suitable for 5-year-olds, but most of them play well to families with kids who are, say, 8-10 and older. MIIB is PG-13 and clearly siphoned off a lot of the younger customers this weekend, to the detriment of Like Mike.

Minority Report and Bourne Identity seemed slightly toned-down from what they might have originally been, in order to get a PG-13. Either could have easily warranted an R if that's what the makers had wanted. I noticed Minority Report had a character clearly mouthing the f-word but the dialog was replaced with something milder.

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For 2001, the top 10 films at my theater were:

Charlie's Angels
The Mummy Returns
Shrek
Training Day
Princess Diaries
Cast Away
Rush Hour 2
Save The Last Dance
Dr. Dolittle 2
Miss Congeniality

For 2002 thus far the list looks like:

That could have possibly boosted the box office some. Only one theater in my area (an independent) was running a full set.

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"Stuart Little 2" is special for another reason: it used "Digital Intermediate" scanned and output at 4K resolution.
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/newsletters/inCamera/july2002/stuartLittle.shtml

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