Audiences Prefer Family-Friendly Movies with No Foul Language

This is not a surprise:

Big Hollywood

Toward the end of this Golden Age of Hollywood, the movie industry was selling 9.43 tickets per person in the United States and Canada, but now sells only about 4.1 tickets per person.

Also, nearly two decades of research by Movieguide, a non-profit family guide to movies and entertainment supported by Christian donors and general subscriptions, shows that family friendly movies with no graphic sex, violence, and obscene language earn more than two to six times as much money at the box office, on average, as movies with such graphic content.

That’s exactly what Movieguide tells Hollywood’s top executives each year in Movieguide’s Annual Report to the Entertainment Industry (which is also highlighted at the Annual Movieguide Faith & Values Awards Gala held each February and attended by many of those executives).

Ironically, a study released by the Parents Television Council in 2008 revealed that the amount of foul language on primetime network TV has skyrocketed since 1998. Meanwhile, a study of foul language in G, PG, and PG-13 movies revolving around teenagers by three Brigham Young University professors shows that the 1980s movies they studied averaged 35 obscenities or profanities per movie, but decreased to 25 per movie in the 1990s and 16 per movie in the current decade, in the wake of Movieguide®’s annual study, which began in 1991.

This is no surprise to Movieguide®, which reported a 2006 poll by The Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg that most teenagers are offended by depictions of foul language and sex in movies and television.