Hollywood adopts a softer touch for changing times

It has been Hollywood's equivalent of America's dependence on foreign oil, and just as damaging. For more than three decades - ever since the first Star Wars movie was released in 1977 and the blockbuster was born - the lifeblood of the Hollywood movie studios has been the easy dollars they've made from the undisputed champs of the box office: adolescent males.

Their taste, often crass and testosterone-fuelled, has to a significant degree determined what movies have been made by the Hollywood studios. Their enthusiasm has made stars out of people like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Young males have been particularly valuable because they have always swarmed to movies during the all-important first weekend of a film's release and because they have gone back again and again to see films they liked.

Boys are now more entranced by what they can find and do online

But, now, in the first significant shift in box office viewing habits in a generation, the young male audience is deserting American cinemas. Adolescent boys are now more entranced by what they can find and do online, and by video games.

This has caught the Hollywood studios by surprise. They are desperately revamping their production schedules, scrambling to appeal instead to the only two growing sectors of the movie audience - women and the family audience.

For decades women have had a raw deal from Hollywood taste-makers. But it is they - or rather adolescent girls - who have turned out in vast numbers over the last two weekends, blissing out on the dream of having young British heartthrob Robert Pattinson sink his teeth into their soft, proffered throats - which he does with such relish in the vampire movie Twilight. The film