Love it or loathe it, there is one thing everyone can agree on: New Moon has surpassed all expectations. Personally, I detest this film and all it stands for. Its popularity, not only with teenage girls but with grown women in their 20s and beyond, has me scratching my head like no other movie I've seen in recent memory.
By now we're familiar with criticisms that slam the Twilight series as abstinence-promoting Mormon propaganda, and deplore the low Rotten Tomatoes score of both the original and its sequel. The legitimate feminist gripes with both the films and the book series that spawned them are also well known. They claim that Bella (a teenage girl, played by Kristen Stewart) is a subservient drip, and that Edward (the vampire she loves, played by Robert Pattinson),is a stalking patriarch.
But, even if it isn't good for anything else, the Twilight sequel is useful for this: in a male-dominated industry, ticket sales have exploded for a film aimed at women.
In the US, early online ticket sales broke box office records set by Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films. Thousands of screenings sold out in advance. It grossed $140.7 million on its opening weekend, ranking it third behind Spider-man 3 and The Dark Knight. In Australia, it nabbed the number-one spot, earning $16.1 million.
And lest you think this is just a tween phenomenon, according to Salon.com, 27 per cent of the ticket buyers were women aged 25–34. With an 87 per cent female audience, it is already one of the top money earners of all time despite being in release for a little over a week. As Melissa Silverstein writes on Women and Hollywood:
'This movie could potentially be 'guy proof' meaning they won't need guys to see it for it to kick some box office butt. Whereas the other franchises NEED women to make their numbers.'
If one thing is clear by the light of the New Moon, it is that women really do go to the movies. Why then, does Hollywood repay them by serving up such bland offerings?
The last female-targeted film to generate anything close to this sort of hysteria was Sex and the City. The TV version was brilliantly written and pushed all the right boundaries, allowing its female protagonists to be sexually active without judging them for it. It is also one of the few series that ended on a high note rather than plodding along until it had jumped the dreaded shark.
Unfortunately, it saved that for the movie — although 'jumped the sashimi' may be more accurate since the low moment of the entire franchise is arguably the scene where Sam (a vibrant, independent woman in the series who for some reason morphed into a bored, clingy housewife for the film), covers her naked body in raw fish and lies waiting for her breadwinner to come home and devour her.
Rather than bay for the filmmaker's blood, as I was wont to do, the loyal fans showed up in droves, earning it a total of $408.7 million worldwide. Although the original was nothing short of appalling, the sequel is currently in post-production.
Like Sex and the City, the original Twilight was a cynical attempt to bring a pre-loved story to the big screen. With poor acting (if Stewart is capable of any expression other than brooding will someone please alert the media?), poorer special effects and a laugh-out-loud script that was not intended to be a comedy, it reeked of lazy filmmaking that saw no need to do anything but the bare minimum, knowing it had an assured audience.
And the sequel is no better. In fact, by general critical consensus it is even worse.
Why are smart films for women in such short supply? The female market is hungry for a moving cinematic experience. The success of Sex and the City and films such as Mamma Mia and Bridget Jones' Diary has shown that the Twilight phenomenon is no fluke and that women can be just as fervent in their fandom as men.
Yet studio executives continue to treat these movies as exceptions. Instead of deciphering what makes female audiences tick, they are content to wait for the next runaway best seller to turn into a sure-fire film hit. New Moon could well go on to be the highest grossing film of all time. Surely this is a sign that it is time for Hollywood actively to engage its female audience.
As Silverstein says, 'Hopefully, this success will infiltrate the minds of Hollywood number crunchers and seek out products for the female audience ... If people start thinking and making more movies that star women and are women driven, it can only help women at all levels of the business.'
Maybe then Hollywood will offer up something that is actually worthy of its female audience's devotion. Not to mention their $15.
Ruby Hamad is a freelance writer and graduate from Victorian College of the Arts, where she majored in screen writing and directing. She also holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Economy from the University of Sydney. Ruby currently lives in Sydney where she is developing several feature film scripts.