Many of his works show this ability to take universal messages to his audience by fusing specific African experiences with modern theatre and traditional story telling.

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According to Universal, Ted's audience was 56% male, while 52% of moviegoers were 30 or older.

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Though the Universal Church provides a captive audience for its religious programming, Record has grown mainly by showing popular American shows and investing in its own telenovelas (soaps).

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"What Universal and the filmmakers did was take this to the next step to satisfy a global audience that is very diverse, " said Nikki Rocco, Universal's president of domestic distribution.

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Smartphones of various kinds are the universal global computer, essentially, and the huge audience means companies such as Angry Birds creator Rovio can become huge very fast.

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Are Warner Bros. and Universal sacrificing revenue for bragging rights or will the core audience find time to see two movies over the same holiday weekend?

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And it does so in a dumbed-down Esperanto that its audience can't fail to understand -- the universal language of commercial TV sitcoms, with their constrained cultural vocabulary and their subtext of harmlessness: Don't be offended, none of this really means anything, it's just a goof about a lot of dumb stuff going down around us.

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