Tired of all the horror flicks and gross-out comedies and stuff blowing up onscreen? Just you wait. Hollywood is getting fed up with grown-ups and is getting ready to abandon us.

Why? Because we don't go to the movies enough. The classy grown-up comedy Duplicity disappointed at the box office, despite the presence of both Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. The classy grown-up Russell Crowe thriller State of Play opened to a smallish $14 million two weekends ago and tumbled 50 percent in its second weekend. The classy grown-up Robert Downey Jr.-Jamie Foxx drama The Soloist can be unkindly said to have crashed and burned in its opening weekend.

Now, you and I, intelligent thinkers on Hollywood and its methods, can point out lots of reasons why these movies -- critically acclaimed as they were -- failed to connect with audiences. A lot of it has to do with the self-fulfilling prophecy that Hollywood's supposition that "only kids go to the movies" often becomes. Multiplexes are unpleasant experiences that cater to teenagers and teenage appetites; a theater that sold cheese platters and wine or microbrews to go with a flick -- and had a restrictive admission policy to keep kids out -- would, I suspect, do astonishingly well. Grown-up movies need to be marketed better. Instead of running ads on TV shows that no one is watching anymore or in newspapers that no one is reading anymore, a movie like State of Play should have been advertised on Huffington Post and Salon and other sites where adult eyeballs actually spend time.

But Hollywood really doesn't care what grownups want:

"Adults are a harder audience to motivate, and the problem with some adult movies is compounded by their not being high-concept films that you can boil down to 30-second spots," a top studio exec said. "With Taken, it was, 'You took my kid, motherf*****, and you're going to pay.'"

See, it's not Hollywood's fault; it's the fault of grown-ups who aren't suckered in by cheap marketing stunts! It's the fault of grown-ups who want complicated movies that can't be boiled down to a quick, profanity-laden logline!

So movies aimed at teenagers are going to dominate the multiplexes even more than they already do. It's inevitable. And when it's all cheapie slasher remakes, cheapie gross-outs, and cheapie college sex romps, and no one over the age of 24 goes out to the movies anymore, Hollywood will say, "Look? See? Grown-ups don't want to go to the movies! Wah!"

And in this environment will spring up a new entertainment creature: the at-home movie premiere. If it's not a corporately owned studio that catches on to this, it will be a consortium of smart actors, screenwriters, directors, producers, and other creative types who have cottoned on that to survive, they had to get small and lean. This will happen sometime within the next five years: A movie starring what used to be called A-listers, written and directed by names we already know and love, will debut with all the pomp and circumstance of a summer blockbuster, but the movie will "open" on pay-per-view. Clever marketing will have created the sense of an event, and ten million set-top boxes will place a $5 order to see this movie over that opening weekend, and a smart, sophisticated movie that cost $15 million to make (because the people who made it were smart and sophisticated, too) will rake in $50 million that first weekend.

Five years after that, a movie that "opened" at home will win the Oscar for Best Picture.

If adults won't go to the movies, ya gotta bring the movies to the adults. The first people to realize that will be the next Hollywood superstars.

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MaryAnn Johanson's smart, sophisticated, film reviews appear at FlickFilosopher.com. (email me)

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