'L.A. Times' Can't Grasp Why 'Grown Ups' Is a Hit

So an Adam Sandler family comedy is released … during summer … with co-stars Kevin James, Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Chris Rock … and the L.A. Times is sincerely confused over why it’s such a huge hit. Here’s their headline: Just how did Adam Sandler’s ‘Grown Ups’ become a hit?

Below that headline are nearly 700 confused and curious words digging into the strange, exotic phenomenon of American moviegoers flocking to an unpretentious, family comedy starring one of America’s few remaining bankable actors who co-stars with 4 guys who have spent 15 years building audience goodwill.

The author of the piece is Steven Zeitchik, and while my confusion with his confusion remains, let’s at least give him points for not pulling a Patrick Goldstein. Rather than speculate until he reached his own conclusion, Zeitchik actually practiced a little journalism:

We spoke with a few distribution experts and movie veterans, and they offered numerous theories. There’s the one that Sandler is back in a comedy that’s recognizably him (apparently, “Funny People” reminded these filmgoers that they liked Sandler, but not enough for them to like the movie).

Or the theory that many of the men who went to see “Grown Ups” recognized some of themselves in it. These would be the thirty- and fortysometings who look back fondly, with no small amount of gross-out pleasure, on their adolescence, and at Sandler, the living embodiment of it. … Bolstering this theory is Sony’s data that nearly half the “Grown Ups” audience was over age 25. …

This is interesting:

But the most interesting explanation may lie with a surprising Sony number: More women saw the movie than men (about 52% to 48%, according to the studio). On its face, that one’s a head-scratcher. You wouldn’t think that women would see themselves in the male characters or, for that matter, in the characters of the one-dimensional wives and girlfriends.

I don’t find that to be anything close to a head-scratcher. What could have more universal appeal than the familiar comfort food of “Grown Ups?”

And what does gender have to do with anything? If women only went to films with “characters they can see themselves in,” at least half the films released today wouldn’t star women.

Zeitchik might have been assigned the story, so I’m not blaming him, but when the movie industry’s newspaper of record expresses surprise over the no-brainer of no-brainers scoring big at the box office, there’s a disconnect.

Shouldn’t someone at the L.A. Times have at least a rudimentary knowledge of what appeals to the everyday American movie-goer? I’m not even suggesting they like the everyday American moviegoer. Or if they don’t want to do that, they could at least bookmark Box Office Mojo and discover that when Adam Sandler makes and Adam Sandler film, his batting average is right around 100%.