The final days of August remind us that we have to say goodbye to the beach and the barbecues. It also means that we are nearing the end of the summer movie season – mostly the superheroes, mutants and robots that have dominated theaters week after week. Soon begins a more “serious” time at the movies: awards season. Distributors will be releasing a slew of titles in the coming months with the hopes of grabbing the gold. And Hispanics may just be first in line to watch them.
It’s no secret that Hispanics are enormous fans of action-adventure, comedy, and animated movies. They turned up in droves in Q2 2014 for these types of movies including Maleficent, Transformers: Age of Extinction, 22 Jump Street and How to Train Your Dragon 2. But to understand the Hispanic moviegoer more, we looked at Simmons and Nielsen data tied to specific genre preferences. This is what we found:
- Dramas are becoming increasingly popular with Hispanic consumers. The highest growth of any genre from any demographic over the past five years came from Spanish-Dominant/Bilingual Hispanics (+39%). When looking at Hispanics overall over the same time period, the genre saw +15% growth, while non-Hispanic decreased by 9%.[1]
- Hispanics represented 18% of the box office dollars for Drama and 21% of Comedy for the 2Q 2014 period.[2]
- Hispanics overindex significantly on being fans of Art House/Indie films and Musicals with a 157 index and a 126 index to total population, respectively.[3]
This is great news for studios, with releases like Gone Girl, Fury, Interstellar, Rosewater, Foxcatcher, Inherent Vice, Unbroken and Into the Woods on their way. Maybe the end of summer has a sunny outlook – for the box office, at least – after all.
[1] Source: Simmons NCS/NHCS Fall 2009-2013 Base: A18+ who have attended movies in the last 6 mos. Movie Genre-Type of Movie Seen. Span-Dom/Bilingual (Speaks Spanish only, Mostly Spanish/some English or Both Equally at home)
[2] Source: Nielsen Entertainment Hispanic Box Office Estimation, Apr 04-Jun 27 2014 period
[3] Source: Nielsen Moviegoing Report, 2013 (Based on MG12-74); “A favorite type of movie to see in a theater”