Twilight: The Fangirls Cometh, with Cash

One dark, rainy night last spring, a young woman brought an offering to the set of Twilight in rural Oregon. “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 start a sequel. Twilight is just one of a wave of movies challenging the conventional wisdom that the taste of young men 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,” says Disney’s president of distribution Chuck Viane. “Now they’ve become the gorilla in the marketplace.” It’s not just the size of a fan base that matters (in the case of Twilight, an audience that made the books best sellers), but the degree of its ardor. In a Fandango survey 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.