Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith Photo: Getty Images
7:30AM GMT 30 Dec 2011
Studios are preparing a series of new releases for 2012 after the success of The King’s Speech proved that films aimed at older cinema-goers can be box office hits.
They include The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which stars the cream of British acting talent as retirees who decide to live out their autumn years in an Indian palace.
Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie, Tom Wilkinson and Ronald Pickup play characters who each have a different reason for upping sticks.
Dame Judi Dench is recently widowed; Nighy and Wilton are a middle-class couple who find they have insufficient savings to fund a decent retirement in England; Celia Imrie is hoping to land a rich maharaja; and Dame Maggie Smith plays against type as a working class Londoner who makes the trip with great reluctance after her hip replacement operation is outsourced to Rajasthan.
The film, due to be released in February, is based on a Deborah Moggach novel, These Foolish Things. The author said of the story: “It came about because I’d been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going to happen to us all.
“The population is ageing - for the first time, the over-50s outnumber the rest of us - and it’s getting older.
“The population is ageing - for the first time, the over-50s outnumber the rest of us - and it’s getting older.
“Where are we all going to live? Care homes are closing, pensions are dwindling and life expectancy is rising. Then I had a brainwave. We live in a global age - the internet, cheap travel, satellite TV. Our healthcare is sourced from the developing countries. How about turning the tables and outsourcing the elderly?”
Old age is also at the heart of Dustin Hoffman’s forthcoming directorial debut, Quartet, a gentle drama about four opera singers living in the same retirement home.
Hoffman has assembled a British cast that includes Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins, Billy Connolly and another appearance by Dame Maggie Smith.
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Based on Ronald Harwood’s stage play of the same name, it is billed as “a joyous film about redefining old age and growing old with hope”.
Other films that should play well to a mature audience include Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a comic story of “late-blooming love” starring Ewan McGregor as a government scientist tasked with an impossible assignment in the Middle East; Ralph Fiennes’ modern-day adaptation of Coriolanus; and a BBC Films version of Great Expectations starring Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham.
The Artist, an homage to the silent movie era tipped to clean up during the awards season, is release on December 30.
Meryl Streep’s long-awaited performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady is one of several biopics aimed at older viewers. The coming weeks will see the release of The Lady, about Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi; W.E., Madonna’s take on the life of Wallis Simpson; and J Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo Di Caprio as FBI director J Edgar Hoover.
The runaway success of The King’s Speech took the film industry by surprise. It grossed £247 million, second only to the final Harry Potter instalment at the UK box office.
It easily outstripped big-budget teenage fare such as Transformers 3 and the latest Twilight film. The success of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy also made the case that audiences are crying out for intelligent drama.
Andrew Collins, broadcaster and film editor of Radio Times said:
"In December, I went to an afternoon screening of Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea, his boldly old-fashioned adaptation of the 1952 Terrence Rattigan play. It had only just opened, to rapturous reviews, and the screen was encouragingly full. I'd say that my wife and I were the only people in there who didn't have grey or white hair.
"I found this massively positive. Films these days are all too tailored for an imaginary teenage boy, the most lucrative and available demographic. It was lovely to be able to sit down in a cinema and enjoy a grown-up film containing no violence and no explicit sex, with patrons who were over 50 and in many cases over 60.
"In all, this seemed a defining moment for me, and I hope to experience it more and more in the years to come as film-makers and studios recognise that the over-50s are an audience worth targeting."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8976326/Hollywood-chases-the-over-50s-with-series-of-new-films.html
Old age is also at the heart of Dustin Hoffman’s forthcoming directorial debut, Quartet, a gentle drama about four opera singers living in the same retirement home.
Hoffman has assembled a British cast that includes Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins, Billy Connolly and another appearance by Dame Maggie Smith.
.
Based on Ronald Harwood’s stage play of the same name, it is billed as “a joyous film about redefining old age and growing old with hope”.
Other films that should play well to a mature audience include Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a comic story of “late-blooming love” starring Ewan McGregor as a government scientist tasked with an impossible assignment in the Middle East; Ralph Fiennes’ modern-day adaptation of Coriolanus; and a BBC Films version of Great Expectations starring Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham.
The Artist, an homage to the silent movie era tipped to clean up during the awards season, is release on December 30.
Meryl Streep’s long-awaited performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady is one of several biopics aimed at older viewers. The coming weeks will see the release of The Lady, about Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi; W.E., Madonna’s take on the life of Wallis Simpson; and J Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo Di Caprio as FBI director J Edgar Hoover.
The runaway success of The King’s Speech took the film industry by surprise. It grossed £247 million, second only to the final Harry Potter instalment at the UK box office.
It easily outstripped big-budget teenage fare such as Transformers 3 and the latest Twilight film. The success of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy also made the case that audiences are crying out for intelligent drama.
Andrew Collins, broadcaster and film editor of Radio Times said:
"In December, I went to an afternoon screening of Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea, his boldly old-fashioned adaptation of the 1952 Terrence Rattigan play. It had only just opened, to rapturous reviews, and the screen was encouragingly full. I'd say that my wife and I were the only people in there who didn't have grey or white hair.
"I found this massively positive. Films these days are all too tailored for an imaginary teenage boy, the most lucrative and available demographic. It was lovely to be able to sit down in a cinema and enjoy a grown-up film containing no violence and no explicit sex, with patrons who were over 50 and in many cases over 60.
"In all, this seemed a defining moment for me, and I hope to experience it more and more in the years to come as film-makers and studios recognise that the over-50s are an audience worth targeting."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8976326/Hollywood-chases-the-over-50s-with-series-of-new-films.html
