Subject says it all.
Inspired by a post in:
Same audience as the book: older kids (9 and up, generally speaking) who like creepy adventures.
ETA: I read the story as an adult and loved it, so for fans of Neil Gaiman and his style of storytelling in general, this kind of through-the-looking-glass tale has a lot of appeal. Disney, Pixar and any quality children’s movie will draw adults as well.
My 9 year old daughter loved it. So did my wife and I. So I’ll say it was aimed at families with older kids. My 6 year old didn’t want to go - she thought the previews and commercials were too scary.
I liked it and I’m in my mid 20’s. Particularly because it was creepy as hell, which (IMHO) is more then most “Scary” movies manage to pull off.
Towards the end, I saw a mom leaving with her kids. I was suprised that they lasted as long as they did.
I found the book well-written but deeply unsettling in places, and have been told that this is an adult reaction to the book and that kids are just fine with it. Haven’t seen the film yet but will be interested to see if I have the same reaction.
Awesome people?
Seriously though, I’m in college and run with the nerdier crowds, and had about an equal size group of friends at Coraline as I did at the Watchmen midnight show.
I’m 33. My dad is 71. We saw it in the theater together, and both loved it.
I took my daughter (age 7) to see it. She absolutely loved it. The weird thing is that she and my wife had made a cloth doll complete with clothes, yarn hair and BUTTON EYES the week before for a school project completely unrelated to the book or movie. I knew she was ok when she still slept with it after the movie. I tease her about it whenever I tuck her in and she sleeps with it, I say “Say hello to your Other-Father for me” and she says “STOP IT!” and grins and goes right to sleep.
The story, good that it was, was secondary for me.
I went more for the 3-D than anything else.
I heard that it was the last week to see it in 3-D, and I Really wanted to see it in 3-D ((Apparently, we are FINALLY getting a steady stream of 3-D movies.)) so I went.
I still don’t get the entire Buttons for Eyes thing.
But, I think that was touching on the exact thing that was the main draw for the film.
I wouldn’t call it scary. It wasn’t a jump out of your skin fest.
Creepy as Hell? YES.
Man, I wish I’d been at your showing…I was the only adult male in the theatre there without a girlfriend and/or a (pre-teen) child.
But…yeah, the movie was probably aimed at the same audience as the book - primarily older kids/younger teens, with an expected (and well-served) adult side audience, either reading/watching it on their own, or with their kids.
I’m 38, my daughter is 8, we both loved it.
I liked it better than the book, which felt a bit first-draft to me. She liked them about equally.
If it’s the same as the book, then at older children who haven’t read much horror yet. I read the book in my mid-20s and was completely underwhelmed by it. It seems like the intended audience is younger than say, The Thief Of Always, which is a similar story in a lot of ways.
Yeah, it was mostly kids and parents at my theater, too. You could tell the movie was a hit because the kids were dead silent through the whole thing.
After it was over, a woman came up to us with her young daughter in tow. She said they’d come in late, and wanted to know what she’d missed. Then she asked what we thought the movie was about. Her cute little daughter started to say, “I think it was about…” before being shushed by her mom. The irony of that, after the movie we’d just seen, was almost painful.
I took my 12-year-old daughter. I thought it would be right up her alley, and I was right. I enjoyed it, too. Neither of us has read the book.