Periphery Demographic / Film

Films — Animation

• Ratatouille, as noted by The Onion and AV Club, has gained a cult following among all artists because it is the best at showing what actually creating art feels like. It also gained recognition from critics as one of the only movies that, well... justifies the existence of critics.
• The How to Train Your Dragon children's movies have a big teenage/twentysomething following on sites like DeviantArt, mostly due to its clever humor and emotional depth. Not to mention the massive legion of teenage girls who watch it primarily for Hiccup.
• Another big DreamWorks Animation franchise, Kung Fu Panda, was enjoyed for the same reasons.
• While Disney Animated Canon films often specifically target young children, or at least families, they have been appreciated by older viewers without children as well. However, there are a few more specific examples.
  • Although flops on their initial release, Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland became hugely popular with college-age hippies and stoners in the late '60s and early '70s thanks to their surrealist imagery. Disney responded by re-releasing both films in theaters with psychedelic marketing geared towards these demographics, which helped the company recoup their longstanding losses on them and made them more acceptable to younger Baby Boomers, who'd previously been dismissive of the studio. This in turn led these audiences to show both movies to their own kids when they grew up, helping it achieve "classic" status by the late '80s.
  • Robin Hood (1973), The Rescuers and The Great Mouse Detective were on their initial release (and to this day still are) very popular films within the Furry community, perhaps even contributing to its creation. Fast-forward a few decades and Zootopia came along, almost openly marketed towards the fandom as a secondary demographic.
  • Inverted for Wreck-It Ralph. Although mainly targeted towards traditional family audiences like the rest of the Disney Animated Canon, it was also made specifically to appeal to the retro-gaming crowd. Ditto with Big Hero 6 and fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • Aladdin gets this big time, mostly because Robin Williams was allowed to ad-lib most of his lines as the Genie. This resulted in him throwing in a lot of irreverent humor and pop culture references that would easily fly over a kid's head, but have the parents laughing hysterically. Also, the movie was first aimed at little boys, because of its male lead. But it got a strong female fanbase as it gained a "Disney Princess movie" classification, as Jasmine is one of the oldest members of the group. Not to mention the Cinderella-like story, the romantic atmosphere, and the attractive hero.
  • A large amount of Frozen's appeal comes from Elsa and how applicable her story is to teens and adults. LGBT+ people relate to her, as do people with anxiety, people with depression, autistic people, etc, etc. As a result, Frozen has a strong fanbase amongst older Disney fans.
• Disney had so little faith in The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was darker in style than its usual fare, that it opted to release the film under its Touchstone Pictures label. Not only was the film unexpectedly popular, but it managed to reach a demographic that Disney barely even knew existed — Goth teens. Notably, rereleases are under the main Disney label.
• The Despicable Me films have gained a huge following of teenage and adult fans. In fact, it's hard to go anywhere without seeing Minion-laden merchandise for different age groups.
  • Minions: The Rise of Gru received an unusually high percentage of teenage viewers for an animated film aimed at families, which was attributed to a social media trend where teenage boys and young men, who were children when the first Despicable Me film came out, attended theaters in droves wearing suits.
• Yellow Submarine was originally created to appeal to teen and adult fans of The Beatles, but it has become a popular way to introduce new generations of kids to the band's music thanks to it lacking anything that'd be considered inappropriate for children, with its bright colors and whimsical tone instead fitting in well with other works of kids' media.
• Inside Out has a large fanbase of high school and college-aged girls who think the story is well-written, and have crushes on Fear, Bing Bong, and Anger.
  • The film is also popular amongst those with autism, since it helps them understand emotions by making them into personified characters.
  • There are also many viewers (mostly in the 0- to 2-year-old range) who are fans of Bing Bong because they are attracted to his voice, color scheme and big eyes as a result of baby schema.
• Monsters University has a small following amongst college students, many of whom grew up with the film it is a prequel to and can relate to the troubles Mike and Sulley go through at college.
• Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is another Dreamworks film with a bigger audience of adults and teenagers than children, due to a combination of said older fans reading the books as children, the colorful animation, and the Ho Yay between two of the male protagonists.
• The Trolls franchise has a fanbase of people older than the target audience of girls 2-12, most of whom are female and obsess over Branch, often pairing him with Poppy and calling the couple "Broppy". It helps that the franchise has great songs, especially in the animated series adapted from the film. It also helps that Justin Timberlake plays Branch in the film, attracting a few of his fans as well. The franchise is so beloved by this older demographic that Dreamworks made adult-oriented merchandise like make-up to promote Trolls World Tour.
• Ugly Dolls has a fanbase of teenage to college-aged girls. Some have a crush on the character of Lou, while others find the titular dolls adorable.
• Shrek was aimed towards families, but was marketed as more "edgy" as its animated contemporaries to help draw in more adults. These viewers enjoy the deconstruction of ogre folklore, as well as the relatable marital problems of Shrek and Fiona, since it’s something that fairy tales (let alone kids movies in general) never bring up. What married adult can’t relate to Shrek's nightmare about being a father or Fiona's frustration with her parents' rejection of Shrek? Even moreso, however, the first film grew an ironic, memetic cult following over a decade after its release, with many fan projects, real-life festivals and crossover memes dedicated to the not-so-jolly green giant.
• A Goofy Movie didn't do well in theatres but became a cult classic on the home video market, and it's very popular with black Americans. Multiple black American writers have written or spoken about why.
• While Quest for Camelot received tepid reception both critically and commercially, "The Prayer" found an audience as a religious song despite its relatively secular origins, thanks to its heartfelt pleas of intercession from God. This became even more apparent with the far better-known Dion-Bocelli duet version having been played in almost every doxology ceremony in the Philippines and a few other countries.
• Turning Red is primarily aimed at preteen girls but, due to its setting of 2002, its fanbase includes Millennials who came of age around that time and, due to its theme of the conflicts that arise from growing up in an immigrant family, it appeals to anyone who experienced that regardless of age.

Films — Live-Action

• Animal House might just be the trope codifier. The film was originally made for grown up Baby Boomers who were part of the youth counterculture of The '60s (the story is set in 1962, just a few years before all of that happened). Lo and behold, the film's biggest fans turned out to be high school and college students, while many of the adults it was marketed at were turned off by its raunchiness.
  • This is actually the case with a lot of gross-out comedies from the late '70s and early '80s. Most of them were marketed towards adults but were much more popular with teenagers. Yes, that's right: the entire phenomenon of Generation X teen comedies owes its existence to an attempt to pander to Baby Boomers.
• Gangster films might be an even earlier example. They are hugely popular with urban blacks, despite featuring white protagonists almost exclusively. This is perhaps because the "ethnic" whites who became gangsters in the past were in some significant ways more "black" than "white", growing up in environments very similar to those of urban blacks.
• 8 Mile arguably succeeded for the opposite reason. Set almost exclusively in a black milieu, but featuring no less than three white (and blond!) actors as major characters, and living (somewhat) like urban blacks. Black audiences got the atmosphere and themes they wanted, while white audiences got to vicariously pretend they were "wiggers."
• The 2020 adaptation of The Call of the Wild (2020) was filmed and marketed with families in mind. However, when released, it found an audience of middle-aged adults and senior citizens familiar with the source material. This unexpected niche audience helped it do better than expected, coming in second place it's opening weekend, even getting close to beating Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) for number one.
• Dirty Dancing didn't test well, and Vestron Pictures was simply going to only run it in theaters for one weekend and then go straight to video (as much of their other films did). Thing is, when they filmed it, they were aiming for teenagers (their primary video rental audience) and it didn't test well with them — they had no idea how appealing the film would be to older people, especially women, which wound up propelling the film into an overnight success story.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was intended for teenage fanboys to get introduced to G.I. Joe and not-so-teenage fanboys to reminisce about one of their favorite cartoons from their childhood. Oddly, a good chunk of the money it made came from Christopher Eccleston's Estrogen Brigade.
• A special on The Terminator pointed out that the original movie unexpectedly attracted a sizable female audience who connected with the action movie's underlying love story.
  • Die Hard, similarly, also has a pretty sizable female audience due to John McClane's sex appeal and the underlying romantic plot between John and Holly.
  • As did the the live-action Transformers movie. Chicks really love the cars.
  • Fight Club, despite being as manly as movies can possibly get, has a large female following (probably due in no small part to Brad Pitt's sex appeal).
• Star Wars is a story about The Hero fighting The Empire IN SPACE, and was seen as a somewhat juvenile film for adolescent males when it came out. It ended up appealing to, in one way or another, absolutely everyone—children can't get enough of the Rule of Cool visuals visuals with epic space battles, awesome lightsaber duels, memorable character designs, and the occasional Ridiculously Cute Critter. Children grow up into adult fans who show it to their children, and the circle is complete.
• The Avengers (2012) was initially aimed at comic book fans. When its success became apparent, it was marketed as a movie for the entire family.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in the same franchise, has an avid fanbase of female fanfiction authors who enjoyed the opportunities for Slash Fic offered by Steve and Sam's friendship and Steve and Bucky's Tragic Bromance, and the strong role for Black Widow that didn't rely on her sex appeal.
• While Michael Moore's 1989 documentary Roger & Me hardly painted GM in a positive light, it became really popular within the corporation due to its humorous and buffoon-like portrayal of GM's then-CEO Roger Smith. By the time of the film's release in the Christmas season of 1989, GM was losing significant amounts of money and market share, leading many employees and executives to become disillusioned with Smith's leadership.
• Quite a few children enjoy The Dark Knight Trilogy just because Batman is popular with kids in the first place. This resulted in a real-life Heartwarming Moment when Christian Bale visited a five-year-old cancer patient whose dream was to meet the real Batman.
• The Burton/Schumacher Batman films were also made for adults. Well, at least the 1989 original was — but kids wound up loving it anyway, PG-13 rating and all. Kim Basinger even remarked that for years afterwards she couldn't go anywhere children were present without being recognized as Vicki Vale. This had pretty grim consequences when it came to Batman Returns: Warner Brothers simply ran with their Periphery Demographic and outright marketed the movie toward children. Big mistake.
• While Tyler Perry's target demographic is black church-goers, his movies are also pretty popular with white Southerners, probably due to both the Christian values promoted, and the fact that most of his works are set in the South (Georgia in particular).
• Superbad was mainly targeted toward the 20-to-37-year-old people who remember what high school was like, but it has also gained many 14-to-18-year-old fans who enjoy the movie for its crazy and naughty humor, and the characters.
• Maleficent was intended to be for children, but the rather dark theme, together with Angelina Jolie cast as the main character, resulted in quite a large adult fanbase.
• Although Paddington (2014) was made for children, there are a lot of adult fans who grew up with the character and love the film as well.
• Emmanuelle is an erotic film based on an erotic novel by a woman, Emmanuelle Arsan. Despite that, the movie was marketed mostly towards a male audience until the makers found out a lot of women came to see the picture, albeit more because of the camp value.
• The Wizard of Oz has become a camp classic in the gay community to people who find it an allegory for their experience growing up in a dreary world and discovering one where they suddenly belong, and see "Over The Rainbow" as some sort of Pep-Talk Song. The Camp Gay mannerisms of the Cowardly Lion and the Reality Subtext of Judy Garland openly having many gay friends at a time when this was stigmatized also helped it earn its status as the Trope Codifier of LGBT Fanbase.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey was released and advertised as a science fiction movie, yet became incredibly popular with hippies for its trippy visuals, especially in the psychedelic "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" segment.
• A Clockwork Orange (1971) became incredibly popular within the Punk Rock community, a subculture that was still an Unbuilt Trope when this film was made.
• Despite zombie movies often being seen as "male oriented" fare, both Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland have at least as many female fans as they do male fans, probably due to their romantic subplots and greater emphasis on survival than combat.
• Ghostbusters was created as an adult comedy like Stripes. However, as noted in Bob Chipman's "REALLY THAT GOOD" video essay on the film, it instantly took off with kids who loved the film as a fun fantasy movie of Science Hero protagonists who took on the stuff of nightmares with Awesome Backpack weapons. As such not only was The Real Ghostbusters Saturday-Morning Cartoon show commissioned, but Ghostbusters II had the heroes stop smoking to set a good example for kids.
• Mad Max: Fury Road, despite on paper being completely Rated M for Manly, has a large female fanbase due to its plethora of diverse, strong and badass women who each get a good deal of focus as independent characters. Charlize Theron's Furiosa has been hailed by critics and audiences as possibly the greatest action movie heroine since Ellen Ripley and, for all intents and purposes, is treated as the real hero of the movie over Tom Hardy's Max.
• Many Withnail and I are also Doctor Who fans, due to how it featured Paul McGann, who plays the Eighth Doctor, and Richard E. Grant, who played a spoof Tenth Doctor, an alternate Ninth Doctor, and the Great Intelligence, who was the Big Bad of Series 7.
• This trope crosses over with Germans Love David Hasselhoff in the case of '70s Hong Kong Martial Arts Movies. While these movies gained a following in America in the 1970s, they were huge among urban African-Americans. As discussed here by Bob Chipman and The RZA (maker of the Genre Throwback The Man with the Iron Fists), a combination of cheap dubs playing in inner-city grindhouse theaters and the themes of many such movies (downtrodden commoners studying secret techniques to fight back against The Man) resonating with lower-class minority youth helped make such films into cult classics within black America.
• Deadpool (2016) has a fanbase among female sex workers who appreciate that Vanessa, the female lead and Love Interest, is a strong, sympathetic sex worker portrayed in a non-tragic, non-exploitative way.
  • It's also popular among geeky women who prefer their romantic comedies leavened with superhero battles and fourth-wall-breaking dark humor.
  • It also became popular with children and teenagers despite being rated R, which also contributed to the film becoming a success.
• Amusingly, a lot of the Fix Fic for Brokeback Mountain — one of, if not the most famous gay male romance story of all time — sent to the author of the original short story is sent by straight men, even with the traditional straight female and gay male following.
• RoboCop (1987) is a bleak, violent and edgy film even by today's standards, let alone those of The '80s. It barely qualified for an R rating, originally being rated X for its several intense and gory scenes. It also contains depictions of cocaine use, prostitution, and attempted rape. Needless to say, it was not intended for children, yet became very popular with children anyway who simply saw the fun superhero movie aspect of it and the underlying adult themes went over their heads.
• Films starring the Brat Pack were popular among children younger than the target audience in their heyday, with many '80s girls admiring Molly Ringwald.
• Dunkirk gained a strong following teenage girls and young women, who weren't the intended audience of a grounded WWII film. It might be because it starred Harry Styles, though director Christopher Nolan wasn't aware of Style's music background and casted him solely based on his acting abilities.
• The James Bond series has long had a very enthusiastic following among music-lovers (including those who ordinarily don't care for action movies) who enjoy the original songs that show up Once per Episode in the opening credits. It's not hard to see why: the roster of artists who've contributed songs to the Bond movies is practically a "Who's Who" of modern popular music. The series has featured musical contributions from artists as diverse as Tom Jones, Louis Armstrong, Paul McCartney, Duran Duran, A Ha, Tina Turner, Madonna, Chris Cornell, Jack White and Adele.
• A (sadly now deleted and unarchived) commentary pondering the memetic status of Jeff Goldblum in The New '10s argues that it partially stems from his being, in the 1980-'90s, one of the few men who worked extensively in "genre" films who was also presented as an object of Female Gaze (the key examples being The Fly (1986), Earth Girls Are Easy, and Jurassic Park). Between this and so many of his heroes being brains-over-brawn types, often Endearingly Dorky ones to boot, the result was his garnering several generations' worth of female sci-fi and horror fans. It's come to the point that Jurassic Park merchandising and advertising has played into this, with both a limited edition Funko Pop! figure and the standard 2019 Lego mini-figure depicting his character's Shirtless Scene post-T-rex attack look.
• 2019's Christmas Rom Com Last Christmas has attracted a rather large periphery demographic of Game of Thrones fans, though it has yet to be released. The film was announced, and the trailer was released, shortly after the end of Game of Thrones, and many thought that Emilia Clarke's character in that show had been poorly served by the show's final season. When Last Christmas was introduced starring Clarke, many fans of GoT cheered Emilia moving on to other projects and leaving the unpleasantness of Season 8 behind her.
• Outside of its original audience of fans of the game and more typical action movie viewers, the 2005 Doom film adaptation has become a Cult Classic for incest shippers in modern Internet fandom culture. To further expand, many of the aforementioned shippers ship the fraternal twins John "Reaper" Grimm and Dr. Samantha Grimm, a Brother–Sister Team who are the film's primary protagonists and serve as The Not-Love Interest to one another. And in the shippers' defense, the film has several cases of Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading regarding John and Sam's relationship, to the point where even some of the film's own characters initially think Sam was John's ex-wife, not his sister.
  • Similar things can be said about House of Wax (2005) and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. All three films have instances of Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading that have the Fan-Preferred Couple be between a pair of siblings, and have appropriately attracted large groups of incest shippers. This makes for the amusing situation where despite all three movies being very dark and gory horror-action films, large portions of their respective fanfiction archives consist of lighthearted fluffy romantic pieces between each film's pairs of sibling protagonists. What certainly helps is that all three films present the (implied) relationships between each sibling pair as rather non-toxic and even positive, which is understandably exceptionally rare to see in portrayals of incest (sub-textual or otherwise) and so is seen as a "welcome relief" by the respective shippers.
• The small but persistent fanbase for TRON seems to be heavily but unsurprisingly populated with IT and tech support staff and/or Computer Science students.
• Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski explain on its Blu-Ray commentary track that of all their films (ranging from Problem Child to Ed Wood), the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon is the one they are most frequently asked about despite it being a Box Office Bomb back in 1999. The inquirers are kids of The '90s who were fans of lead actor Jim Carrey; unable to see the R-rated film theatrically, they caught up with it in cable airings — many citing it as their first R-rated movie. For them, the unusual protagonist (who died in 1984, so most of these kids would have not heard of him) and the postmodernist approach taken to telling his story were things they'd never experienced in a movie before.
  • Indeed, Jim Carrey's sudden arrival on the A-list in 1994 was in part due to this trope. As Bob Chipman discussed in a retrospective article, In Living Color! was not a kid-friendly show but a lot of kids watched it anyway and were fond of his colorful characters and Slapstick skill — to the point that Disney Adventures did a short interview with him at the height of its popularity! As a result, they turned out in droves alongside or in lieu of adults for the PG-13 rated Ace Ventura — Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber in 1994. With this in mind he would be cast in more family-friendly PG fare alongside his "harder" work; in particular, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and the Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) movies are among the biggest financial successes of his career.
• The Color Purple (1985) is very popular among white women, even though the few white characters in the movie are antagonistic. This is because, while the movie is about the experience of black women in the early 20th century, its central themes of sisterly love and women supporting one another are broadly applicable. After all, during that time period even white women didn't have many options for escaping an abusive marriage.

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