New Moon, the second instalment of this remarkably-successful series, began selling out cinemas on Thursday, and promptly shattered box-office records. In the US, it sold $70m (NZ$95m) of tickets on its opening day, more than any other film in history. By Sunday night, it had clocked-up global earnings of roughly $260m (NZ$355m, an opening-weekend figure only bettered twice.
Millions of "Twi-hards" with their T-shirts proclaiming allegiance to "Team Jacob" or "Team Edward" are duly turning this teenage fantasy into the biggest youth entertainment franchise since Harry Potter, with an overall value estimated to be in the tens of billions. British actor Robert Pattinson, the film's square-jawed male lead, may not be competing for Oscars any time soon; but he is nonetheless suddenly one of the most valuable men in show-business.
"What's refreshing is that it has not just drawn the usual audience of horror fans, but also appealed to a teenage girl sensibility. It has managed to draw much more widespread acknowledgement," said Ali Jaafar, the international editor of Variety in London. "The first in the series was big but this second one has built its success on new fans."
Setting the box-office showing in context, Tim Richards, chief executive of Vue Entertainment cinemas, one of the UK's largest commercial chains, said simply: "These were the largest attended midnight shows we have ever done. We were adding extra shows right up to the last moment to cope with the demand."
Not bad, you might say, given that the books that spawned Twilight, by US author Stephanie Meyer, were mercilessly panned by literary critics, with one British newspaper declaring them: "astonishing, mainly for the ineptitude of prose."
Not bad, either, given the lukewarm critical reception for both films: New Moon garnered just 37 per cent positive reviews on the filmranking website Rotten Tomatoes, which dubbed it "too long" and complained of its "clunky" storyline.
But who is making all the money? The most obvious first answer, of course is Ms Meyer, a devout, somewhat reclusive, 35-year-old Mormon who lives in small-town Arizona and claims the idea for the Twilight novels first came to her in a dream in 2003. Her four-book series, told from the breathless, girly perspective of Bella, has since sold more than 85m copies, and been translated into 37 languages, netting her an annual income that was recently estimated by Forbes magazine at $50m (NZ$68m).
This article is from www.nzherald.co.nz
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