When I was a teen and into my early twenties, there were a slew of movies made for the high school/college demographic every year. Straight comedies like Ferris Beuller’s Day Off and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, comedy dramas like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, for college there was Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds.
There were also straight B movies (though widely released) that existed largely for showing women’s breasts (Screwballs, the Porky’s series, Spring Break.) They all followed the same formula - get some unknown young actors, set them in familiar surroundings, and watch the cash flow in.
Around 2000, the genre was revived with the American Pie series (raking in hundreds of millions in profits) and things like Dude, Where’s my Car? Then it seemed to disappear again. To the extent that it exists anymore, it’s a very occasional release or straight to video.
Nowadays it’s all comic book movies. Why would a very sucessful film genre just die off like that? Is it something about today’s teens?
It has little to do with the attitudes of today’s teens. Genres–even very successful ones–can die off if they become creatively exhausted and audiences get bored with them. The apparent dearth of movies about teens/young adults (although some would point to recent and upcoming releases and argue no such dearth exists) is likely due to this.
Probably because like lots of other genres, once a good one comes out and makes a ton of money the next few years see a glut of increasingly shittier copycat movies until no one can make any money on them anymore and they just stop making them for another 10 years or so.
I expect that the movies that were excuses to show off breasts died out because these days it’s easy enough to find all the uncovered breasts (and so much more!) you like on the Internet.
You kids might not remember, but back in the 80s there was no internet. And that means no internet porn. And so, men and boys would watch crappy horrible movies just because they featured nudity and adult situations.
Nowadays who’s going to sit through 90 minutes of crappy sub-sitcom level stories just to see 30 seconds of a women’s basketball team taking a shower? If you want to see a group of naked women taking a shower together nowadays, it takes 15 seconds of typing.
There have been some excellent ones, they just haven’t pulled huge audiences for some reason. The best of the recent crop is Easy A, and Fired Up was a classic teen sex comedy that was far better than it had any reason to be.
Neither had any boobage that I recall, but as Der Trihs points out, boobage is easy to find.
Speaking as someone who grew up with those films in the 80s, the audience grew older but didn’t really mature that much. Those 80s teen sex comedies have now been replaced by what are essentially similar films staring characters (quite often played by the same actors from those 80s films) now in their 30s and 40s:
The Hangover
Grown Ups
Hot Tub Time Machine
Role Models
Wedding Crashers
I Love You Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
40 Year Old Virgin
Old School
so on and so forth.
You still have high school films like Superbad or 17 Again (AKA the umpteenth remake of Freaky Friday).
But isn’t there something special, magical even, about big, silver screen boobage? It’s like a good baseball/basketball/soccer brawl: you don’t watch the game specifically to see one, but if it happens it’s the only part you’ll remember.
I couldn’t tell you what the hell The Gift was about, but I’ll never forget Katie Holmes topless.
Of recent vintage, I immediately thought of Easy A and Superbad. There’s something called Prom coming out this weekend, which looks like it’ll appeal to the *Gossip Girl *demographic. I’m sure there are other recent examples of films for and about teens if you look for them.
Why aren’t there as many successful examples of the genre now as there used to be? I dunno, but things change. Maybe there’s no deeper explanation than that. Popular culture looks different now than it did 25 years ago, and 25 years before that.
If you did not see Piranha 3D, you missed a classic movie of this type. Really, Joe Bob Briggs would have loved to have seen it the way God intended these movies to be watched, from his own personal automobile.
Another movie in roughly the same genre, and even more awesome, was Machete.
I agree with this. Hearing people who grew up before the internet was widely available talk about going to see movies purely for their T&A value is something that I can’t relate to at all, and I’m in my 20’s. For people younger than me it must sound even weirder.
Also, there are a ton of teen dramas and reality shows on TV that fill that void; a lot of things that weren’t around before everybody had cable. Teens and tweens have entire channels of programming targeting them.