Movies centered on stories about blacks are suddenly doing big box office, which the Hollywood Reporter attributes to white moviegoers increasingly part of their cinema audience.
“Never before has such a diverse slate of black-led films performed so well at the box office as they have in recent months,” says the Hollywood Reporter article by Pamela McClintock and Rebecca Ford.
Weinstein Co.’s “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” grossed $115 million in domestic box office (on a $30 million production budget), and Fox Searchlight’s “12 Years a Slave” rolled up $27 million. “Fruitvale Station,” another Weinstein release, grossed $16 million, which is better than expected for a downer drama about a police shooting.
Says the article: “In January 2012, whites made up a scant 7 percent of the opening audience of ‘Red Tails,’ George Lucas’ movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, the Air Force’s first black pilots. … That compares with about 43 percent for ‘12 Years a Slave’ and 55 percent for ‘The Butler.’ Some of the top-performing theaters for both films are in white suburbs.”
Looking at racial makeup of cinema audiences in a demographic snapshot, blacks are about 12% of the U.S. population and account for 11% of ticket sales.
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