Hollywood Is Reeling—and PG Movies Have Never Been So Popular
The PG rating has become the king of the box office. The entertainment business now relies on kids dragging their parents to theatres.
4 min
There’s one reliable group of moviegoers left in America—and they can’t go to the movies by themselves.
This week, the kids who make up the industry’s target audience will be heading to theaters for “Zootopia 2” and “Wicked: For Good,” sequels to box-office sensations that could be the highest-grossing movies of the year.
They also have something else in common that has become essential to Hollywood’s biggest hits.
They’re rated PG.
For decades, the movies that printed money were all rated PG-13. It was the rating of the most successful films ever made: superhero franchises, “Avatar” and “Avengers” releases, “Star Wars” episodes, “Titanic,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” the world of “Jurassic Park” and everyone from James Bond to Barbie.
But the entertainment business has never been so dependent on kids dragging their whole families to theatres for the latest PG movie.
Among the bright spots in a bleak year for Hollywood were “A Minecraft Movie” and “Lilo & Stitch,” which are currently sitting atop the domestic box office.
They may soon be jumped by “Zootopia” and “Wicked.” The list of PG hits this year also included the live-action remake of “How to Train Your Dragon,” which improbably beat the latest “Mission: Impossible.”
Meanwhile, last year was the most lucrative year of all time for PG movies, and there are more PG sure-things on the slate for coming years as studios pump out the movies that continue to defy the industry’s gravity.
To put it another way, the people with the most juice in Hollywood right now are 10 years old.
“Kids and preteens,” a recent National Research Group report concluded, “have been the driving force behind many of the biggest theatrical success stories of the past three years.”
The kids and preteens in the youngest generation have grown up with the ability to watch any movie on any device anytime and anywhere they desire.
As it turns out, the place they really want to watch movies is the theater. And theaters are perfectly willing to cater to their most loyal customers.
“If we have an R-rated or horror film on the same day as a PG animated film, I can promise you: We’re always going to try to play that PG animated film,” said Phil Zacheretti, chief executive of Phoenix Theatres Entertainment, which operates multiplexes across the country.
His strategy for those PG films is both simple and profitable.
“We basically try to play every studio’s PG films in as many theaters as we can,” he said.
By now, theatre owners understand those movies are their safest bets. Last year, “Inside Out 2” finished No. 1 at the box office.
The first “Wicked” was very, very popular, too. Anyone with young children was probably in theaters for “Moana 2,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” or “Despicable Me 4,” if not all of them.
The result was the first year that PG won the box office after decades of getting trounced by PG-13. And it might just happen again this year.
PG movies have always performed well. But once upon a time, they came with a stigma. “Older audiences thought PG was not going to be cool enough, and families with kids thought PG was going to be too edgy,” said Paul Dergarabedian , Comscore’s head of marketplace trends.
“It was the opposite of the Goldilocks rating.” Only recently has the rating of animated classics, Broadway musicals and video games become just right.
But their rising value isn’t just about PG movies doing better. It’s also about PG-13 and almost every other kind of movie doing worse.
At this point, not even superheroes are guaranteed attractions in Hollywood. Neither is Sydney Sweeney. There are still PG-13 juggernauts, like “Superman,” “Jurassic World: Rebirth” and the upcoming behemoth “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”
But every original PG-13 or R-rated movie like “Sinners” that gets adults to theaters without their children feels like a miracle.
Once they get to the theatre, children want different things than their parents. For them, moviegoing is deeply social, according to NRG’s study, and the single most powerful driver of their behavior is spending time with friends and family.
For as long as theatres have existed, kids have gone there to hang out. Until they couldn’t. In 2020 and 2021, a century of established habits was suddenly disrupted.
When family movies went directly to streaming, the industry feared that PG audiences wouldn’t come back when they could just stay home.
But in a dramatic twist, Gen Alpha now prefers theatres more than Gen Z, millennials or Gen X. If anything, they’re hungry for experiences that are more theatrical. They want immersive screenings—think IMAX , 3-D, Sphere. What they don’t want is to immerse themselves in phone screens.
“They’re not looking to replicate what they can get in their living rooms and bedrooms,” said Fergus Navaratnam-Blair, NRG’s vice president of trends and futures. “They’re looking for something that gives them a reason to disconnect.”
They’re also looking to engage in “participatory fandom.” PG releases meet that demand. Even theater-averse Netflix supplied Gen Alpha with limited theatrical runs of “ KPop Demon Hunters.”
In recent years, audiences sang along to “ Wicked ,” dressed up as Gentleminions and went nuts for Minecraft references their parents just wouldn’t understand.
Those full-blown viral frenzies help movies explode into movements. You might wait to see a movie if you can avoid shelling out for tickets, popcorn and a babysitter.
But your kids won’t. The whole point of seeing a movie is participating in the online memes around that movie, which means they must see it immediately.
This week, despite mixed reviews, “Wicked: For Good” was tracking for the highest ticket presales of any PG movie ever, according to Fandango.
As predictive indicators, those presale numbers are useful. Penn Ketchum, the managing partner of Penn Cinema, wasn’t sure what to expect from the upcoming “David,” an animated biblical children’s movie from a studio that specialises in faith-based content.
But when every showtime at his Pennsylvania and Delaware theatres had strong pre sales, he added screens. Then he added more. When it’s released in December, he predicts “David” will beat the box-office goliath of “Avatar” in some of his markets. “Which will be a massive upset,” he says.
Other PG titles have something else going for them. Navaratnam-Blair calls it “intergenerational nostalgia.”
When “Toy Story 5” comes out next year, for example, millennials who saw the original in theatres as kids 30 years ago will be accompanying their own kids.
Of course, not every PG movie goes to infinity and beyond. This was also a year when Pixar’s “Elio” flopped and Disney’s live-action “Snow White” was left for dead .
But those bombs were the exceptions that proved the industry’s rules of success. After all, today’s audiences don’t have a connection to Snow White. They care more about the star character of another PG movie coming out this year: SpongeBob.
Which means their parents will be taking Hollywood’s most reliable moviegoers back to theatres next month—just as soon as they leave Zootopia and Oz.
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Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to build a business without building a team. As AI takes over coding, customer support, marketing, administration, and other day-to-day tasks, a growing number of solo founders are scaling startups to millions in revenue with few—or even no—employees. While the trend is lowering barriers to entrepreneurship, it is also reshaping hiring, raising questions about the future of work and how businesses will grow in the AI era.
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Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs. He’s already added 10,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in $10 million in revenue this year.
One thing he hasn’t added: any other employees.
The 40-year-old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching, and then often running, new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Broca’s emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers and grant refunds when issues arise.
Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun-drenched Sausalito, Calif., living room. “I think compromises make lukewarm results,” he said.
Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.
An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.
In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground, said Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe’s chief economist. “Now, AI can be a built-in business partner,” he said.
AI’s ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. But the technology’s ability to also handle key tasks in tech, like coding, make that field a particular hot spot.
Analyzing Census Bureau data, Bank of America Institute economist Taylor Bowley found that among all industries, new business applications in the information sector have seen the biggest percentage increase—nearly 45%—over the past year. At the same time, the rate of information-sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry.
This Census dataset doesn’t track solo-operated businesses. But the numbers broadly show—in tech and beyond—that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that’s a strong sign that solo operators are on the upswing.
“The bar for getting started has never been lower,” said Julian Weisser, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator—which offers founders seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake—attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May.
Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers’ accounts while paying to access Anthropic’s Claude to run his clients’ requests—that AI company, as well as others, charges based on usage. He has since switched to free open-source AI models from China.
Broca said he has raised $30 million from investors and, at the same time, has saved millions in salary since he hasn’t needed a team of software engineers.
Another risk: If it’s easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI-assisted business, copying them can be easy, too. This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnston, who runs an AI-assisted business alone in Orlando, Fla.
“Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now,” said Johnston, 40, who used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit, with no employees, and is continuing to grow.
What one-person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility, too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go-it-alone entrepreneurs show how the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities.
“If everyone’s hiring less, but you get four times more firms, what does that do to head count?” said Rembrand Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co-authored a recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees.
Koning also believes a soft hiring environment that’s left some people mired in long job searches has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses.
Some founders cite different motives. “It’s a perfect storm of post-pandemic burnout and a re-evaluation of one’s priorities, and also booming AI and a sense of what’s possible,” said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Breinigsville, Pa.
Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had worked at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social-media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing. “It was like my chief of staff, a second in command,” he said.
The business ultimately petered out within months, though, and Ahmad is now back to a full-time corporate role with a utility company.
For Claire Vo, 41, AI helped her turn a passing impulse into a business. She was working full-time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late 2023 to help code an app that would help her manage documentation and design for new products, with customers ranging from financial services to healthcare firms.
“I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT,” said Vo, who lives in San Francisco.
She put the app online for $1 a month, and within weeks people downloaded it thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Vo’s company—which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer—now has 100,000 users and is on track to make seven figures in profit this year. AI handles the company’s marketing, sales and customer support.
While AI is a shortcut, Vo said her network and credibility in the industry were key. “I think people over-index on how easy AI is and under-index on how much I did to get to this point,” she said.
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