Word: twilighter
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...dark, rainy night last spring, a young woman brought an offering to the rural Oregon movie set of Twilight. "She gave her infant to a vampire," director Catherine Hardwicke marvels. Actually, the Twilighter - as the mostly female devotees of Stephenie Meyer's vampire romances call themselves - had driven hours to get pictures of her baby with the cast. Even before Twilight hits theaters Nov. 21, the series' readers have exhibited enough excitement - if not hysteria - to persuade the studio, Summit Entertainment, to get screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg cracking on adaptations of the next two books. (Read TIME's 10 Questions with...
...Twilight is just one of a wave of movies challenging the conventional wisdom that the taste of young men is what drives the box office. This year female fans helped make monster hits of High School Musical 3 ($84 million), Mamma Mia! ($144 million) and Sex and the City ($152 million). "[Female-centric films] used to be counterprogramming to something extremely male in the marketplace," says Chuck Viane, Disney's president of distribution. "Now they've become the gorilla in the marketplace." (Read Richard Corliss's review of Twilight...
...sound-track news to hungry fans via websites like Twilighters.org, BellaAndEdward.com and TwilightMoms.com. In July, the studio brought the cast to Comic-Con in San Diego, where, for once, shrieking fangirls outdid hooting fanboys in the audience - in number, ardor and decibel level. In recent weeks, the studio sent Twilight's 22-year-old British star Robert Pattinson on a tour of appearances at the mall-based clothing store Hot Topic, where he was greeted by Beatlemania-caliber crowds. Pattinson's San Francisco appearance was canceled after a crush of fans left one girl with a broken nose...
...Along the way, the escalating fervor of the Twilight audience - a group that bought 17 million books - helped Hardwicke make the movie she wanted to make. "I used that as a tool to convince the studio to give me more money," the director says. "I said, 'Let's do it right for the fans.' " (See 90 years of vampires onscreen...
...sales are any indication, surrendering to the Twi-hards is working. Twenty-four hours before the film opened, some 2,000 shows were already sold out, many of them midnight Thursday-night screenings. And in a survey Fandango conducted of early ticket buyers, 85% said they plan to see Twilight more than once. It wouldn't be the first time young women paid to see a movie over and over again; the same demographic helped Titanic become the highest-grossing film of all time...