nancy drew movie This is actually a serious question, and one that Hollywood has struggled with in recent years. The tween market, after all, is huge. On the small screen tween girl viewers have catapulted the Olsen twins, Miley Cyrus and other Disney starlets, many now fallen, into major commercial if not critical success. In bookstores preteenage girls (the definition of “tween” fluctuates, though the brackets encompass 9-to-14-year-olds) have propelled series upon series of realistic fiction and middle-grade fantasy onto the best-seller lists. But those heroines rarely translate into feature-film success. A 2007 adaptation of the beloved Nancy Drew books, starring Emma Roberts.
strategically lowered its heroine’s age to about 14 but made only $25 million at the domestic box office. That film barely outearned last summer’s Beverly Cleary adaptation, “Ramona and Beezus,” which starred Selena Gomez. Even Anne Hathaway couldn’t inspire attendance in 2004 for “Ella Enchanted,” based on Gail Carson Levine’s Newbery Honor winner about a 14-year-old girl. Despite this record, on Friday, Smokewood Entertainment and Relativity Media will release “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” in the hope that the same girls who propelled books about 9-year-old Judy to sales of 14 million copies will flock to theaters. It’s a daunting challenge for the third grader of the title. “Marketers and the media basically invented the category of tween girls,” Ilana Nash, author of “American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture,” said in an interview. “But it seems like Hollywood doesn’t know what to say about them.
The Judy Moody series, which began in 2000, belongs to a sturdy genre of early chapter books: the everyday capers of a school-age child. This is a form Ms. Cleary perfected in her Ramona books, and it has been updated continuously to feed new generations of readers’ appetites for stories about girls like them. The protagonists in these books tend to be good-hearted but not goody-goody, smart but not insufferable, eager to please but not always able to do so. They have conflicting emotions that they themselves do not always understand. Most important, they achieve the golden trifecta for tween heroines. Readers can relate to, aspire to be and occasionally feel superior to them — all at the same time. “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer” not only has to replicate this elusive tween. It also has to create a compelling narrative arc out of the homespun proceedings that define the books: misjudged classmates, run-ins with the teacher and the like. The screenwriters, Kathy Waugh and Megan McDonald, the books’ author, take Judy out of the classroom and invent one of the overarching goals that characterize each of the books. In this case Judy’s mission is to enjoy her summer despite the absence of her two closest friends and her parents, and the unwanted presence of younger brother, Stink, and her Aunt Opel.
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