POPULARITY: Books by Stephenie Meyer have sold well over 100 million copies worldwide; film adaptations are gigantic blockbusters in theaters and on home video; highest grosser Eclipse made $300 million domestically
FACEBOOK FOLLOWERS: 35.2 million
TWITTER FOLLOWERS: More than 1 million
FAN NICKNAME: Twi-hards, Twilighters, Team Edward, Team Jacob
MAIN HANGOUTS: YouTube, where Twi-hards like "nuttymadam3575" can post tearful reaction videos, and Twilighted, where fan fiction flourishes (50 Shades of Grey famously got its start as thinly veiled Twilight fan fiction).
AVERAGE DEMOGRAPHIC: Teenage girls and women in their twenties who like their romantic fiction to have some supernatural spark.
DEVOTIONAL PROFILE: Every so often, Hollywood gets a reminder that young men aren’t the only ones who go to the movies in droves. It happened in 1997, when Titanic became a cross-demographic blockbuster that nonetheless earned most of its cash thanks to repeat business from young women. Still, the lesson didn’t truly sink in until 2008, when the first Twilight film earned a staggering $192 million from an audience that was almost exclusively female. The first film was well timed, arriving at the feverish peak of popularity for Meyer’s book series, and it made superstars of its three leads; the next three sequels would do even better, earning around $300 million each. Studios that had formerly been on the hunt for the next Harry Potter franchise now modified their search: Maybe, if they tracked the avid reading habits of young women, they could find the next book-to-film phenomenon in its infancy.
What was it about the Twilight series that fans sparked to? Partly, it's the way the series flirts with sex (the bloody transition from human to vamp is a metaphor for the loss of virginity) while still remaining chaste enough that younger fans can be drawn in … at least until Edward and Bella have their honeymoon night. But Meyer was smart to stoke her fans' passions with the central love triangle between Bella and her beaus Edward and Jacob; when battle lines were drawn online between those who were Team Edward and those on Team Jacob, it only increased the bond between the reader (or viewer) and Meyer's story. Twilight fans are so ardent, in fact, that geek mecca Comic-Con had to start slotting its Twilight panels earlier in the convention to suit the Twi-hards, who regularly queue up days in advance for the film franchise’s panels, swamping the less devoted fans of Marvel movies and other comic-book blockbusters. Those boy-heavy fan bases bristled at the intrusion, but they’d better get used to it: The record-breaking success of Twilight on the best seller list, at the box office, and on home video is only the beginning of a femme-dominated genre force, not an anomaly.
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Via Twilightish
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