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From the Silvering of Audiences to the Silver of Spin-Offs

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Abstract

This chapter explores the silvering of cinema audiences contituted in terms of box office profits, Hollywood’s market research and the interface with consumer culture. An emerging and profitable ‘silver’ cinema audience is located in the context of its declining youth counterpart, while film industry responses to the silver audience are identified, including improvements to the fabric and services of movie theatres, the silvering of stardom and the proliferation of films with old age protagonists and storylines. Accounts of the cinema screen as a shop window are rehearsed while Mamma Mia! The Movie and The Best (and Second Best) Exotic Marigold Hotel exemplify the silver of profits accrued from DVD/Blu-ray, soundtrack CDs and associated download spin-off sales of old age films. The on-screen utopian pleasures of these films are aligned with a tourist gaze and the exploitation of film locations by Greek and Indian tourist industries that variously reiterate ageist, sexist, homophobic and neo-colonialist discourses.

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Correspondence to Josephine Dolan .

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Dolan, J. (2017). From the Silvering of Audiences to the Silver of Spin-Offs. In: Contemporary Cinema and 'Old Age'. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58402-1_2

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