Just when many in the mainstream media were writing off 2014’s Millennial attendance as the beginning of the end to a long love affair the movies have had with adolescents and young adults, the release of the latest installment of the hugely successful Fast & Furious franchise, Furious 7, re-ignited the power of the silver screen to attract droves of young people to the local bijou.
According to Screen Engine/ ASI, they surveyed over 1,300 attendees to Furious 7 this past weekend and reported the film to have an audience profile of 61% under the age of 25! That is, roughly estimated, nearly 11 million attendees aged 13-24, which comprised better than half (52%) of Furious 7’s total movie-going audience.
To give these kinds of numbers perspective, one might ask, “What can we compare them to?” Well, actually, the answer is ”nothing” -- at least nothing that ran on TV this past weekend, including the NBA Final Four or A.D. The Bible Continues.
Figures like those above are pretty impressive and indicate in no uncertain terms Cinema’s viability as a large audience-grabbing source that might not readily come to the mind of many media mavens.
Additionally, while Cinema’s 1st Quarter 2015 demographic numbers are only available through February as of this writing, the audience delivery of Persons 18-34 (aka Millennials) is outperforming this time last year by almost 26%, 86,517,781 vs. 68,802,516. In fact, if you just look at the 86 million Millennials that Cinema is delivering through the end of February, it is pacing at 82% of 1st Quarter 2014. Or to put it another way, Millennials would have to stop going to the movies altogether for 1st Quarter 2015 not to exceed last year’s performance.
I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen, and another thing Millennials certainly won’t stop doing is prowling the social media environment, which fuels their movie-going motivation. We know that there is no group more connected or active in social media than Millennials, and when an event likeFurious 7 hit the theaters, they pounced. Last Monday, Business Insider wrote astory on the successful global release of Furious 7 and in it they touched upon the fact that the film’s “huge social footprint,” as well as its multi-cultural cast, had an enormous effect on driving the appeal of this film franchise with Millennials. The