yes, girls like movies too...

Ah! But, do they like ,i>guys who like movies? (assuming their good looking, funny, intelligent gentlemen.) There's a stigma that's a scourge in our culture...

Yeah, I'm being tongue in cheek, for the sake of being semi-discussion provoking.

(BTW, MaryAnn, I made a cartoon caricature avatar for you--you do *not* have to use it in anything. I've been making them for fun for everyone I know. I'm curious what you thought of yours.)

I'm sorry, I'm just not following your logic on the first part of your article.

The LAT piece is absolutely starting from a retarded premise: "...seasonal returns are now up only 5% since May 1, compared with a year ago." OH NOES! And it ignores a couple important factors:

1)The Writer's Strike: 2009 was always going to be a weak summer for the movie business. Some moves got rushed to production, others got scrapped. Two major holiday releases (Star Trek and HP6) we moved to summer, but not even to "major" release dates (pre-pre-Memorial Day and post-4th of July, respectively).

2)The insane May release schedule: seriously, why does no one seem to notice how all the major studios seemed to blow their wad (excuse the male-centric metaphor) in May? Star Trek, Wolverine, Terminator:Salvation, Angels and Demons, Up: all tent poles, all May releases.You yourself noted how nothing got you psyched for June. T:RotF was that month's only really big release. And what was the major 4th of July movie this year? Public Enemies. Really?

Now, you say that the successful films this summer are "doing well because they’re appealing to women as well as to men." Your choice of phrasing implies that's the only reason. I'm sorry, but I don't follow that logic. Certainly, broader audience appeal is always a reason for greater success. But it's really rather incidental. Especially in the case of this summer's hits. Star Trek, Up, The Hangover, and T:RotF don't seem to show signs of any intentional appeal to women. The the success of The Proposal and Transformers, at best, indicates that woman will flock to crap just as fast as men. Um, congratulation, I guess?

Your next point is "The story here... [is] “Women are the key to movies’ success.” Isn’t it?" No, not really. It's part of the story. The (potentially) increasing affect of word-of-mouth, with the use of tech and social networking, is just as valid. More valid then either of these, I think, is "Foreign audiences have different tastes"/"films without international appeal won’t get made". Numbers alone bear this out: expanding the audience for a movie to include American women and men could increase a film's potential audience by roughly 100 million. Expanding to an international males alone could increase that audience by 200 million to perhaps 1 billion. (I think that's a reasonable fraction of the 2.4 billion non-American males in the world.)

you're right, it's yet another crappy "analysis" article, that seems to miss a lot. And you are absolutely right that studio execs and entertainment writers should really stop being surprised that women go to movies too. But women audiences are not "the first lesson of this summer". I don't understand why you would think it would be.

PS: would you like comments on "This Week in Women" posts to be cross posted on the AWFJ site?