G and PG Movies

Hollywood has discovered something huge: family.

The industry made its biggest profits last year from G- and PG-rated movies. G stands for general audiences; PG stands for parental guidance suggested.

It plans to fill the nation's screens in the next few years with even more princesses, monsters, talking animals, bright school kids and scrappy ballplayers.

It's not hard to see why. This year's biggest surprise, 20th Century Fox's story of pre-historic animal bonding, has grossed more than U.S. $140 million in just four weeks after release. This follows blockbuster family films in 2001, when three of the top four highest-grossing films ("Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", "Shrek" and "Monsters, Inc") were rated G or PG.

Bob Harper, vice chairman of 20th Century Fox, noted that a decade ago, family movies were either for kids or the mothers, who decided what the kids would watch, he said.

Over time, the success of movies like "Toy Story" and "Shrek" demonstrated that movies about children, even animated ones, could appeal to fathers and teenagers as well as mothers and small children.

Industry executives and observers attribute the interest in family-oriented fare a combination of factors.

The growing sophistication and popularity of computer animation is one thing. Another is the U.S. government's increased scrutiny of marketing adult fare to under-age audiences and a more conservative national mood after September 11. The emergence of a new generation of parent filmmakers would be considered a third factor.

Producer, Barry Mendel ("The Royal Tennenbaums" and "The Sixth Sense"), notes that it's not just in theatres that family films do well.

In the aftermarket of videos and DVDs, a G-rated film will sell up to five times as many units as an R-rated film, Mendel said, as parents search for suitable films for their children to watch at home.

Edwin Catmull, president of Pixar Animation Studios, noted that when family films turn into blockbuster hits, "People have a hard time believing it. They had to have something edgy and push some bounds to prove something for some reason."

"When 'Toy Story' came out (in 1995), it was very successful," he said.

"It was a surprise. Nobody knew who we were. People were hungry for these kinds of films."

Short Answer Questions

1. What has Hollywood discovered?
2. Family films used to be ____.
3. What is the meaning of the words "appeal to" (Paragraph 6)?
4. What is the first factor of G-films' boom?
5. What happened to "Toy Story" in 1995?

(Keys.)