Parents (Financially) Support Tween Phenomenon at the Box Office

"In Hollywood the recent news that Miley Cyrus is to star in a remake of The Bodyguard and that Zac Efron will headline a new version of Saturday Night Fever seems particularly poignant. For it represents a passing of sorts, an axis shift between generations. It is the tacit acknowledgement that a movie industry once built upon the solid efforts of John Travolta dramas and Kevin Costner thrillers is now utterly in thrall to the glamour and the power of the new tween superstars.

Selling the dream of ordinary kids in ordinary high schools doing extraordinary things (putting on musicals, becoming handsome vampires), these inviolably wholesome and family-friendly entertainers are fuelling merchandising bonanzas and breaking box-office records. Ticket sales, for instance, for the three recent movies from Cyrus, Efron and Pattinson have already reached $750 million (£456 million) on exceedingly modest budgets — the High School Musical movie cost only $11 million to produce. In the current cash-strapped climate, says Ali Jaafar, international editor of Variety, this is regarded as the pre-eminent business model. “These guys are being offered everything right now,” he says. “They are seen as the next generation of stars, and producers want them attached to their projects because they know the studios will immediately say ‘Yes!”

And yet, tween success is not simply the result of giant corporations such as Disney cynically exploiting gullible children, says Barry Rosenbush, producer of the three-part High School Musical series. “The interesting thing about the tween audience is that they’re still connected to their parents,” he says. “Parents still need to give their permission to buy things, to download off iTunes, to buy DVDs. So an interesting dynamic develops between the parents and the children, where the parents want the children to go to High School Musical because it’s empowering, and to Twilight because it’s about romanticism. All good clean family entertainment that makes parents feel safe.

Indeed it is the parents of tween consumers who are the silent drivers of this boom, says Greg Livingston, co-author of The Great Tween Buying Machine: Marketing to Today’s Tweens, and the chief development officer at WonderGroup, a tween marketing agency in the US whose clients include Disney and Hasbro. “The former Generation X and Y kids who are parents now have this entirely inclusive family philosophy — they include their children in all decisions, from what food they’re going to eat to what car they’re going to buy,” he points out. “The dynamic between parents and young children really changed [in the past decade] and they became what we call a superconsumer: a mom and a kid together.”"