Flashback to December 2007. A typically macho year in cinema was coming to an end, and There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men were rightly tipped to sweep the Oscars. With the honourable exception of Juno, films aimed at women had flopped. Jeff Robinov, Warner Bros's president of production, had been scarred by heavy losses on The Brave One (starring Jodie Foster) and The Reaping (starring Hilary Swank) and allegedly announced a moratorium on female leads. And while this provoked tuts, there were tacit nods, too. Films for female audiences just didn't seem to make much money. They, and their leading ladies, had to go.
Female-centric films haven't always equalled bad box office. For cinema's first five decades, women were the ones who dictated viewing habits. In 1939, four of the top 10 highest-grossing films were about or starred women, including, of course, the massive hit, Gone With The Wind. But all that changed with the advent of television, when the number of people who made a weekly trip to the cinema began to slump. The one group who bucked the trend were teenage boys, and George Lucas and Steven Spielberg harnessed the spending power of this demographic in the 1970s, when they realised that they would not only turn out for the opening weekend, but for repeat viewings too.
The accepted wisdom has persisted that teenage boys decide a film's success, but cultural shifts have made this model wildly outmoded, video games having shrunk the pool of 15- to 24-year-old men who actually want to leave the house. The female audience is therefore potentially more powerful than it has been for years, but it wasn't until 2008 that studio bosses came up with products to satisfy it. First came the surprise success of Sex and the City, which was initially dismissed as a result of simple brand loyalty. Then came Mamma Mia!, whose barely believable figures - it is the fastest-selling DVD ever in the UK - are less easy to explain away. And, turning a blip into a trend, schoolgirl vampire flick Twilight made $70m on its opening weekend in the US, from an audience highly dominated by young women. It looks likely to mirror this performance when it is released in the UK next week.
Box-office analyst Jeff Bock says that Twilight's success "is a game-changer. It's an industry-changing performance. We've awoken a sleeping giant." Several giants, in fact, straddling several age groups. Sex and the City performed best with twentysomethings, half Mamma Mia!'s total audience was women over 30, while Twilight sated the under 25s.
Bruce Snyder, president of US distribution at Fox, says that these figures are turning women-led films "into event titles, making a picture's opening look more like [that of] a male action movie than a genteel female movie". But what is going to make the next few years challenging - terrifying, perhaps - for studio bosses is that it's still pretty unclear what female audiences are looking for. None of the three big hits this year have exactly been masterpieces, and the top-grossing film ever made by a female director remains What Women Want, the Nancy Meyers romcom in which Mel Gibson gains magical powers of feminine intuition. Can this be what women really, really want? Pallid Helen Hunt and Mad Max in a leotard? Or could it be that we're just desperate for anything aimed in our direction?
Stand by, then, for a slew of films hastily catering to the mysterious women's audience. There will no doubt be multiple spawns of the wedding-themed Mamma Mia! - the news that Ted Danson, Tom Selleck and Steve Guttenberg are to reunite for Three Men and a Bride (three ageing fathers walk their little girl down the aisle) may be one of the most shameless examples of coat-tail grabbing ever. So gird yourself for the hits and misses - here are some of the films being marketed our way next year:
Rachel Getting Married
Released January 23
Chick-flick veteran Anne Hathaway plays a jealous sibling in this acclaimed new drama from Jonathan Demme. In fact, she's a jealous sibling with, gulp, a weekend pass out of rehab to attend her sister's nuptials. Things naturally go very wrong, and Oscar buzz has already been generated by the show-stoppingly excruciating rehearsal dinner scenes. Women are as susceptible as men to the lure of a jolly night out over an improving headache though, so chances are that many of us may end up plumping instead for Bride Wars (January 9), in which Hathaway has more wedding trouble - this time with rival bride Kate Hudson.
Doubt
Released February 6
To follow her decidedly unchaste role in Mamma Mia!, Meryl Streep has chosen to star in this deadly serious 1960s-set tale of a schoolteacher nun who suffers doubts after she suspects a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of getting too close to a pupil.
There is just the faintest whiff of parody about this (Kate Winslet's Oscar-hungry, habit-wearing cameo in Extras comes to mind), but it's apparently excellent. It co-stars Amy Adams, whose fairytale film Enchanted raked it in at the box office last year.
He's Just Not That Into You
Released February 6
For those who don't fancy two hours of Streep in a wimple, here's a paper-light romcom starring Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson and Drew Barrymore, based on the straight-talking dating manual of the same title. It's not the last of these weird adaptations we'll see in 2009 - Hilary Swank has snapped up the film rights to French Women Don't Get Fat, the finger-wagging weight-loss manifesto that instructed us on how to be as slim as our eclair-scoffing Gallic sisters. Presumably the logic is that self-help books are to women what graphic novels are to men, and are therefore ripe for adaptation. Yikes.
Wendy and Lucy
Released February 6
This has been tipped as a terrific film: Kelly Reichardt's sombre tale of a homeless woman, Wendy (Michelle Williams), and her lost dog, Lucy. It doesn't sound like the sunniest watch (subplots revolve around the obstacle course of scumbags Wendy negotiates), so this is in danger of falling into the same let's-watch-something-fun-instead trap as Rachel Getting Married. Still, dogs are generally perceived to be catnip to women. Look out for some seriously girly marketing of Beverly Hills Chihuahua (talking-dog comedy, January 19) and Marley and Me (labrador weepie, March 13).
Confessions of a Shopaholic
Released February 20
Based on Sophie Kinsella's dubious chick-lit franchise, Isla Fisher stars as a girl with a shoe fetish who gets a job on an investment mag to pay off her spiralling debts - and frankly it's hard to imagine anyone with a brain popping along to this. But it may still prove a winner. Producer Denise Di Novi (whose snoozy romance Nights in Rodanthe failed to set the box office alight) credits the balance between "real emotion and wish fulfilment" as the reason for Sex and the City's success, so expect more of that here. The argument goes that Carrie Bradshaw may have been fabulously clad, adored by her pals and enviously slim, but she was also 42 and jilted at the altar. Likewise, then, a woman with a cupboard full of Jimmy Choos and a bedside drawer of unpaid bills may prove an empathetic heroine.
The Young Victoria
Released March 6
The success of Mamma Mia! was initially credited partly to artful programming: the musical opened in the US on the same weekend as The Dark Knight, in the hope of appealing to women unmoved by the thought of spending 140 minutes in the dark with Christian Bale. That same manoeuvre must be behind the decision to release this costume drama about Queen Victoria's early relationship with Prince Albert, against Watchmen - surely the most eagerly anticipated comic book adaptation yet.
Cadillac Records
Release date to be confirmed
It has taken a while for Hollywood to twig that Motown biopics are guaranteed winners: what's not to like about stonking tunes, enormous tantrums and tumultuous relationships? Dreamgirls (2006) is the preeminent example of the genre, but even Taylor Hackford's 2004 biopic Ray majored on the women in the Mr Charles's life. Cadillac Records stars Beyoncé Knowles as the singer Etta James, and looks set to go big on her many troubles with men and drugs as well as her superlative tunes.
