It's a good question the LAT asks and attempts to answer, citing recent history -- the low grosses for Our Family Wedding and Just Wright; Searchlight's placement of the Taraji P. Henson vehicle Baggage Claim into turnaround -- as a sign that Lionsgate and Tyler Perry might have the market cornered on black filmgoers. Searchlight co-president Steve Gilula naturally denied that Baggage Claim is any sign of the label reconsidering its approach to this audience ("[W]e've had great success with a number of movies in this category. There's no fundamental strategic shift and we're not walking away from black-oriented films."), but I wonder if that denial isn't part of the problem. After all, Searchlight has never made "black-oriented" films. Very few studios really have.
The closest Searchlight itself ever came was Notorious, the Biggie Smalls biopic that made a fine showing in January 2009 with nearly $37 million. But to the extent that movie was about a black man, it wasn't about black experience. It was about a crossover superstar whose life and death carved out its own color-blind section of the wider cultural mythology. The demographics were secondary. The same is generally true of The Secret Life of Bees, which performed almost equally in a tougher season. Here, however, Searchlight had the benefit of hedging; based on a best-selling novel by a white Southern woman, Bees could live or die as a chick-flick or urban flick. Queen Latifah ended up with a NAACP Image Award nomination for Best Actress -- but so did Dakota Fanning, around whose character the film revolved in the first place.
This year is much more instructive, however. Our Family Wedding purported to join Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia's families is unholy, goats-on-Viagra matrimony. "Oh, those crazy blacks and Mexicans!", the marketing yowled. "They're just like us!" Yes, us -- the hegemonic "us" to whom Hollywood makes little secret of pandering, all while extolling its sensitivity to the imperative of putting minorities onscreen. Fittingly it opened soft (sixth place) and finished softer ($20 million) last winter. Too bad it didn't come out a month ago; we could have sunk it in the Gulf of Mexico and plugged BP's busted oil well with its condescension in a matter of minutes.
Then there's Just Wright, another "black-oriented" film that was sold and positioned no differently than a "white-oriented" film. Queen Latifah and Common? An athletic trainer and a pro basketball player? As romantic leads? So you stick a basketball on the poster and that makes it "black-oriented"? What? And just like that, another underwhelming $19.4 million later, here we are with Baggage Claim in turnaround and Fox Searchlight denying it's getting out of the market it never truly entered in the first place.
The thing is that Searchlight knows that had it kept its nerve, Baggage Claim (which the studio optioned more than two years ago) absolutely would have been the studio's urban-cinema litmus test. Based on David E. Talbert's best-seller (and set to be written and reportedly directed by the author himself, who is as big a name among African-American readers as Perry is to African-American TV- and moviegoers), it played with fairly standardized romcom conventions -- thirtysomething single woman goes on a 30-day air journey around the country to find the man of her dreams. This is such an obvious success-in-waiting it's ridiculous -- which isn't to say there weren't at least some of the development troubles that Gilula cited in pulling the plug. (To wit, producers wanted to shoot this summer; Searchlight says its plate was full.) But to dismiss a proven, relatively inexpensive property targeted at African-American women seems to be leaving a lot of money on the table. That audience is historically underserved, making up the majority of Perry's viewers not because he's "Tyler Perry" but because Perry and Lionsgate dared to gamble on black films for their own sake -- not as some crossover effort or an exercise in Hollywood liberal guilt. It could have proved -- and hopefully still can prove -- that studios will meet African-American viewers more than halfway even if the majority of their demographic won't.
Publishing knows it, TV knows it, and now movies need to know it: That is black-oriented cinema. Different industries? Kind of, sure. And is it my studio money to spend? Of course not. But on days like these I wish it were, because I would make a fortune.