In Hollywood the recent news that Miley Cyrus is to star in a remake of The
Bodyguard and that Zac Efron will headline a new version of Saturday
Night Fever seems particularly poignant. For it represents a passing of
sorts, an axis shift between generations. It is the tacit acknowledgement
that a movie industry once built upon the solid efforts of John Travolta
dramas and Kevin Costner thrillers is now utterly in thrall to the glamour
and the power of the new tween superstars.
In this brave new Hollywood the brand leaders are 16-year-old Cyrus, a
perpetually perky Disney Channel TV phenomenon and star of the box-office
smash Hannah Montana: The Movie, and Efron, the 21-year-old
all-singing, all-dancing star of the High School Musical series.
Together with Robert Pattinson, the 23-year-old British Twilight
heartthrob, they are the highly profitable front line of an entertainment
model that motivates 8 to 12-year-olds (the traditional age-span for
“tweens”) to part with their pocket money with unswerving efficiency.
Selling the dream of ordinary kids in ordinary high schools doing
extraordinary things (putting on musicals, becoming handsome vampires),
these inviolably wholesome and family-friendly entertainers are fuelling
merchandising bonanzas and breaking box-office records. Ticket sales, for
instance, for the three recent movies from Cyrus, Efron and Pattinson have
already reached $750 million (£456 million) on exceedingly modest budgets —
the High School Musical movie cost only $11 million to produce. In
the current cash-strapped climate, says Ali Jaafar, international editor of Variety,
this is regarded as the pre-eminent business model. “These guys are being
offered everything right now,” he says. “They are seen as the next
generation of stars, and producers want them attached to their projects
because they know the studios will immediately say ‘Yes!”
And yet, tween success is not simply the result of giant corporations such as
Disney cynically exploiting gullible children, says Barry Rosenbush,
producer of the three-part High School Musical series. “The
interesting thing about the tween audience is that they’re still connected
to their parents,” he says. “Parents still need to give their permission to
buy things, to download off iTunes, to buy DVDs. So an interesting dynamic
develops between the parents and the children, where the parents want the
children to go to High School Musical because it’s empowering, and to Twilight
because it’s about romanticism. All good clean family entertainment that
makes parents feel safe.”
Indeed it is the parents of tween consumers who are the silent drivers of this
boom, says Greg Livingston, co-author of The Great Tween Buying Machine:
Marketing to Today’s Tweens, and the chief development officer at
WonderGroup, a tween marketing agency in the US whose clients include Disney
and Hasbro. “The former Generation X and Y kids who are parents now have
this entirely inclusive family philosophy — they include their children in
all decisions, from what food they’re going to eat to what car they’re going
to buy,” he points out. “The dynamic between parents and young children
really changed [in the past decade] and they became what we call a
superconsumer: a mom and a kid together.”
During the past decade, children’s cable stations like the Disney Channel and
Nickelodeon developed the first wave of tween stars, such as Hilary Duff,
who from 2001 played a goofy child on the brink of adolescence in the Lizzie
McGuire TV series. That was the year of the first Harry Potter
movie too, and with it came the acknowledgement that a billion-dollar
franchise could be carried by three unknown actors who were tweens
themselves: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson.
The Olsen Twins and Lindsay Lohan also emerged at this time. Lohan was a
double talent with both the pop album Speak and the 2003 hit movie Freaky
Friday. While the twins (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen) quickly became
heads of a $100 million merchandising empire that was fuelled by a series
called The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley — about a pair of
singing supersleuths whose catchphrase is “We’ll solve any crime by dinner
time!”
It wasn’t until January 2006, however, that the modern tween bug truly bit,
with the broadcast of the first High School Musical. That TV movie,
about two star-crossed students, a basketball ace Troy (Efron) and a maths
nerd Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens), who fall for each other during auditions
for the school play, was broadcast to more than 225 million people around
the globe, sold nearly four million soundtrack albums and spawned two
equally profitable sequels. “Every major network was trying to find a way to
connect to that tween audience,” Rosenbush says. “But High
School Musical came along and exceeded that connection. It electrified
the audience, stimulated them to watch the movie, buy the merchandise and
learn the songs.”
Subsequently set free, the tween phenomenon proved rapacious, unleashing much
of its alleged $180 billion annual spending power (in the US alone) on safe,
parentally approved entertainments such as Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, the Twilight
series and the Harry Potter franchise.
Today, new tween stars are emerging seemingly by the hour. Chace Crawford, the
23-year-old star of the TV series Gossip Girl, is the new Zac Efron,
having taken over when Efron dropped out of a forthcoming remake of Footloose.
That movie, alongside other projects, such as Memoirs of a Teenage
Amnesiac and High School Musical 4, promises to unleash another
wave of clean tweens upon the world.
Yet there is something fundamentally eerie about the worldview presented to us
by tween superstars. Here transgression, rebellion and sexual curiosity are
almost entirely absent. Sex is especially problematic, ignored by the High
School Musicals, denied by the Jonas Brothers (all self-declared
virgins) and a subject of hysterical angst for the protagonists of Twilight,
where lusty physical contact will ultimately lead to death. And though the
tween world is hardly expected to embrace the realist excesses of, say, the
director Larry Clark (Kids), its blatant depiction of life denuded of
even the smallest sexual nuance, though clearly appealing to parents, is
ultimately counterintuitive, coolly corporate and anti-human.
In fact, the cracks in the tween worldview start to appear only when,
ironically, the tween superstars themselves run up against real life. In two
short years, the former idol Lindsay Lohan went from the $150
million-grossing Herbie Fully Loaded to two arrests, the LA under-age
bar scene, a stint in rehab and a broken career. Naturally, the tween world
wasn’t impressed, says R. J. Willliams, CEO of the website
YoungHollywood.com. “Lindsay Lohan is a problem brand that they’re going to
have a lot of difficulty resurrecting,” he says. “She’ll always be around,
and will find a way to make money out of her status, but as far as being an
A-list star in the movie world, those times are behind her.”
Similarly when Miley Cyrus was photographed topless last year by Annie
Leibovitz for Vanity Fair, clutching a sheet to her breasts, she was
castigated by the powers that had helped to make her a star. “For Miley
Cyrus to be a ‘good girl’ is now a business decision for her,” said Gary
Marsh, president of Disney Channel Worldwide, at the time. “Parents have
invested in her a godliness. If she violates that trust, she won’t get it
back.” Here the rhetoric is unforgiving and even cultish. Cyrus, unwilling
to Lohan-ise her career, was duly contrite: “I took part in a photoshoot
that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and
reading the story, I feel so embarrassed . . . I apologise to my fans, who I
care so deeply about.”
Elsewhere tween superstars often speak of an ambiguous relationship with their
own stardom. Pattinson has observed: “Every 13-year-old girl has read [the Twilight
books], and you can almost guarantee that wherever you go you’ll hear, ‘Oh
my god! It’s Edward Cullen!’ ” He later added, “I’m kind of a paranoid
wreck. It’s getting photographed. You have people who analyse your facial
expressions to the tiniest degree. So you’re just trying to avoid getting
photographed. You’re like, ‘Jesus! You can’t win!’ ” Efron, too, has said
that fame can be difficult, stating: “These days everyone is just waiting
for me to f*** up. But I’m not going to give them that satisfaction.”
And yet some would argue that these statements are not just celebrity
petulance, but clever ways of putting distance between the star and the
tween brand. Jaafar observes: “Miley Cyrus was laying the groundwork with
those Vanity Fair photos to say, ‘Look! I have this in me! I’m not
just a sweet girl who can do pop songs!’ It gave her that slight adult edge
that she’s going to need if she wants to stay in a career.”
For, like all manufactured goods, the shelf-life of the tween superstar is
finite. In some cases, it’s perilously short. Thus the tween superstar must
spend much of his or her superstardom deciding exactly how to escape
unscathed, and with a career intact, from this proscriptive world. “I would
like to be like Madonna, who keeps reinventing herself,” Cyrus said
recently. To complicate matters further, the tween audience is a transient
beast and, according to Livingston, replaces itself “every four to five
years with a whole new group of tweens. You ask an 11-year-old now who
Hilary Duff is, and they wouldn’t have an idea.”
So, yes, the tween superstars are the new power elite in Hollywood, but only
within the confines of their proven brand. The real test is to see how much
power they can retain when they move away from that brand. In this context
Efron in Saturday Night Fever seems like a safe bet, as does Cyrus
playing a spoilt chanteuse opposite a security agent (to be played,
reportedly, by Hugh Jackman) in her Bodyguard redux. Pattinson, too,
is taking only tentative steps away from the Twilight brand, next
playing a romantic lead in the contemporary love story Remember Me.
At the moment, says Jaafar, it is all about potential. “These actors certainly
have the power to get films made, but whether they can sustain a long career
on top, you just can’t tell.” He adds: “It only takes two or three flops for
stardom to go.”
Meanwhile, of course, there is still time to savour Efron, Pattinson and Co at
their captivating peak, dominating the world and saturating the market with
their cool, clean — and strangely antiseptic — charms.
Hollywood tweens: the next big things
Chace Crawford Who? A 23-year-old who got his big break in the 2006 teen
thriller The Covenant.
Tween credentials? Plays the smooth hero of the waspy high-school series Gossip
Girl. Won People magazine’s Hottest Bachelor of 2009 award.
Next Up? Playing the dancing rebel role in a new adaptation of Footloose.
However, will also play a drug dealer in a 2010 movie called Twelve,
which could be a problem for the faithful.
Vanessa Hudgens Who? A 20-year-old singer and actress.
Tween credentials? Played Gabriella Montez, heroine of the High School
Musical series.
Next Up? Starring in Bandslam, the X-Factor style story of a
high-school Battle of the Bands, and Beastly, another update of Beauty
and the Beast.
Emma Roberts Who? The 18-year-old daughter of actor Eric Roberts (and niece of
Julia), starred in her first movie, at 9, as Johnny Depp’s daughter in Blow.
Tween credentials? Star of the Nickelodeon TV High School series Unfabulous,
mermaid movie Aquamarine, of Nancy Drew, of the movie Hotel
for Dogs, and so on.
Next Up? Starring as a basketball player in the heart-warming The Winning
Season, and in Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac.
