Women take centre stage at the box office

Los Angeles

HEADING into the all-important summer movie-going season, two converging box-office trends are startling studios: Women are driving ticket sales to a degree rarely, if ever, seen before, while young men - long Hollywood's most coveted audience - are relatively AWOL.

With the release of The Divergent Series: Insurgent over the weekend, women have delivered the three biggest live-action openings of the year. The audience for Insurgent, which took in an estimated US$54 million from Friday to Sunday, was 60 per cent female. The opening-weekend crowd for Fifty Shades of Gray was 67 per cent female, and women made up 66 per cent of the audience for Cinderella.

It would be easier to dismiss those percentages as a fluke - three big female-oriented movies just happened to arrive in proximity - if a parade of movies aimed at young men had not bombed over the same period. Among the carnage: Jupiter Ascending, Seventh Son, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Chappie and, over the week…