Blind Side pulls up to Twilight. Old Dogs suffers identity crisis.

What a difference a week makes. Last week, “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” broke a one day box office record by bringing in $73 million. But a week later, "The Blind Side" has become the little film that could and has pulled even in daily box office receipts. The Sandra Bullock water works special takes you down the path of Michael Oher and his improbable journey from poverty to professional football player. It is this type of box office gyration that sends studio execs running for Grecian Formula (or Clairol for the ladies).

But Sandra Bullock’s tear jerker benefited from weak new releases aimed at narrow target audiences. The two new entries with wide release were “Old Dogs” and “Ninja Assassin”. It’s easy to identify the target audience for Ninja Assassin (Midwestern grandmothers), but Old Dogs appears to be suffering from a misdirection of sorts.

“Old Dogs” was touted as being from the makers of “Wild Hogs”, even taking pains to rhyme the titles in order to drive the point home. Both movies star John Travolta and both were directed by Walt Becker. The message was clear, “Hey Wild Hogs fans, come see “Old Dogs!” The only problem is that one has nothing to do with the other, a major marketing blunder if you’re trying to reel in an audience.

The similarity between the two is that they both are a compilation of sophomoric gags. But Wild Hogs (try not to say Wild Dogs or Old Hogs) is a somewhat raunchy, male mid-life crisis, road trip, buddy picture. It is the type of picture that if done well, can hit a large audience. Although reviews were negative, it still did well pulling in $254 million worldwide and thus setting the stage for a sequel.

However, something went wrong on the way to finding a word that rhymes with hogs. Old Dogs is much less raunchy with more kid friendly sophomoric gags. When you realize that the target audience for Dogs is actually parents with kids ten years old and under, it makes perfect sense. An eight year old would be howling with laughter at Old Dogs, but the movie has been inextricably tied to Wild Hogs, which makes a lot of movie goers and movie reviewers just plain mad. One star reviews and F’s abound.

The people that wound up going to Old Dogs, teenagers and older, were looking for a raunchy comedy and were sorely disappointed. The people that should have gone, parents with kids, didn’t bother. And so Old Dogs is headed for DVD purgatory.

Still, all is well in movieland. All of the aforementioned movies, Blind Side, Twilight, Ninja and Dogs have reasonable production budgets and all will be profitable. They are part of a new Hollywood trend to keep costs down and it is a trend that will probably result in better movies by forcing producers to rely on the power of good writing. And the company behind Old Dogs, Disney, just learned a marketing lesson. It’s hard to believe a multi-billion dollar media corporation needs to learn such a lesson, but the point is taken nonetheless. Note to self, market to target audience.