What women really want?

Flashback to December 2007. A typically macho year in cinema was coming to an end, and There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men were rightly tipped to sweep the Oscars. With the honourable exception of Juno, films aimed at women had flopped.

Jeff Robinov, Warner Bros's president of production, had been scarred by heavy losses on The Brave One (starring Jodie Foster) and The Reaping (starring Hilary Swank) and allegedly announced a moratorium on female leads. And while this provoked tuts, there were tacit nods, too. Films for female audiences just didn't seem to make much money. They, and their leading ladies, had to go.

Female-centric films haven't always equalled bad box office. For cinema's first five decades, women were the ones who dictated viewing habits. In 1939, four of the top 10 highest-grossing films were about or starred women, including, of course, the massive hit, Gone With The Wind.

But all that changed with the advent of television, when the number of people who made a weekly trip to the cinema began to slump. The one group who bucked the trend were teenage boys, and George Lucas and Steven Spielberg harnessed the spending power of this demographic in the 1970s, when they realised that they would not only turn out for the opening weekend, but for repeat viewings too.

The accepted wisdom has persisted that teenage boys decide a film's success, but cultural shifts have made this model wildly outmoded, video games having shrunk the pool of 15 to 24-year-old men who actually want to leave the house. The female audience is therefore potentially more powerful than it has been for years, but it wasn't until 2008 that studio bosses came up with products to satisfy it.

First came the surprise success of Sex and the City, which was initially dismissed as a result of simple brand loyalty. Then came Mamma Mia!, whose barely believable figures - it is the fastest-selling DVD ever in the UK - are less easy to explain away. And, turning a blip into a trend, schoolgirl vampire flick Twilight made $70 million on its opening weekend in the US, from an audience highly dominated by young women. It looks likely to mirror this performance when it is released in the UK next week.

Box-office analyst Jeff Bock says that Twilight's success "is a game-changer. It's an industry-changing performance. We've awoken a sleeping giant." Several giants, in fact, straddling several age groups.

Sex and the City performed best with twentysomethings, half Mamma Mia!'s total audience was women over 30, while Twilight sated the under 25s.

Bruce Snyder, president of US distribution at Fox, says that these figures are turning women-led films 'into event titles, making a picture's opening look more like (that of) a male action movie than a genteel female movie'. But what is going to make the next few years challenging - terrifying, perhaps - for studio bosses is that it's still pretty unclear what female audiences are looking for.

None of the three big hits this year have exactly been masterpieces, and the top-grossing film ever made by a female director remains What Women Want, the Nancy Meyers romcom in which Mel Gibson gains magical powers of feminine intuition. Can this be what women really, really want? Pallid Helen Hunt and Mad Max in a leotard? Or could it be that we're just desperate for anything aimed in our direction?

Stand by, then, for a slew of films hastily catering to the mysterious women's audience. There will no doubt be multiple spawns of the wedding-themed Mamma Mia! - the news that Ted Danson, Tom Selleck and Steve Guttenberg are to reunite for Three Men and a Bride (three ageing fathers walk their little girl down the aisle) may be one of the most shameless examples of coat-tail grabbing ever. So gird yourself for the hits and misses - here are some of the films being marketed our way next year: