Hollywood is honing in on the Millennial market with Elf, Mean Girls, and Hunger Games back in cinemas
Help! We're now old enough to feel nostalgic about things and we don't like it.
Get your Ugg boots out because Hollywood is officially cashing in on millennial nostalgia this year. Not only is Hunger Games back in cinemas with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but the Mean Girls musical is coming to the big screen next year and Elf is hitting cinemas across the country just in time for the holiday season. It's like the film industry looked at everyone in their 30s and said “I bet they’ve got some cash to spend.” Well, we don't, but we're still gonna go see these films because Elf is a classic.
Elf’s return to select theaters isn’t entirely unexpected. Will Ferrell’s holiday classic turns 20 this year so we can understand why it would have a healthy dose of nostalgia at the moment. The same is actually true about Mean Girls, which turns 20 next year when the film adaptation of the stage musical is expected to come out. This is after the cast reunited in an awkward Walmart Black Friday ad. The latest Hunger Games film is coming out more than a decade after the first movie in the series was released. Throw in the fact that we’re getting yet another Dragon Ball series, which aired the final episode of its original American run in 2003, and it feels like everything is aimed at exploiting millennial viewers’ nostalgia for the things we grew up with.
Of course, it's easy to be cynical and say that Hollywood is running out of fresh ideas, but the more accurate takeaway is that the things we love are getting old and so are we. The fact that Elf is old enough to drink in most parts of the world has just hit us like a ton of bricks and we need to sit down for a bit.
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