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.