Why girls rule the marketplace

Although big stars do get bums on seats, these days they don't necessarily guarantee enough of them for the film to make a profit. However, what does seem to sell tickets are relatively unknown teenage girls (they also don't cost nearly as much to employ as Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant).

Even better if they star in a television programme. Scream and Scream 2, the hit teen horror movies directed by Wes Craven, featured Neve Campbell of Party of Five, while I Know What You Did Las Summer starred her Party of Five co-star, Jennifer Love-Hewitt.Women, young and old, have been absolutely flocking to the cinema in their droves since Titanic, a film which half all American women under the ageof 25 have seen twice. Ticket sales to teenagers now account for almost 30 per cent of all movie tickets sold, so - not all that surprisingly - Hollywood is consumed with how to entice that young, enthusiastic female audience.

And what pleases young women these days? Television provides a guide: female heroes (heroines, even) for a start, with Buffy, the 16-year-old vampire slayer as a fairly typical example. The TV series is incredibly popular among teenagers in the States, and it also comes in for pretty positive feedback from the critics.

Using the supernatural as an allegory for the inner emotional turmoil of the adolescent female, it has been described by TV critics as "great television". Great television, then, would involve a "luscious, pouting Buffy kick-boxing and wisecracking her way through each episode".

Yes, that's definitely great all right - but what accounts for the rise of the teen chick you wouldn't want to mess with? Feminism and the increasing economic power of women, according to some social commentators.

And it's not all in the movies. Young women are also topping the pop-music charts both here and in the States. Brandy and Monica's The Boy Is Mine, in which the babes scrap over a boy before making friends and dumping him, topped the charts in the States, while 17-year-old Britney Spears spent a fair whack of time at number 1 in Britain.

Meanwhile, according to Penguin Books, publishers are trawling around to find the lucky teen writer who will be the adolescent answer to thirty-something Nineties favourite, The Diary of Bridget Jones - a funny, confessional, "real-life" memoirs.

But surely teen boys spend as much money as their female counterparts? Why are they not being lured into the cinema by Hollywood moguls?

Because apparently, where the girls go, the boys will follow - and if the girls all trot in to watch Titanic, you're more than likely to find a fair share of young hopeful males trotting in after them.

Girl power or what? However, the down side is that the preoccupation with youth has made it even more difficult for older women to get parts, except maybe as "Mom" - particularly now that the tender age of 25 is being rapidly redefined as "older". Hollywood producers are increasingly asking whether parts written with 30- and 40-year-olds in mind couldn't be cast younger.

"Women sort of fall off the face of the earth when they reach 40 years old," comments one American academic.

Still, as one manager says, "you have to be sensitive to what the realities of the marketplace are."