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