You have to admit. Twilight reshaped entertainment, even if some critics still roll their eyes.
As all five Twilight movies return to theaters from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2 for the book series’ 20th anniversary, it’s worth asking: has any “bad” movie been more influential than the sparkling vampire saga?
Twilight fundamentally changed the entertainment landscape, creating new market categories, and proved female audiences could drive blockbuster success. More than $3 billion in worldwide box office revenue suggests audiences found something critics missed entirely.
I was aware of Stephanie Meyer’s books when they exploded on the scene, but I never read them and still haven’t. It was fun to be online at the time, though, as the fandom grew, and I got snippets of some of the book’s more ridiculous plot points. (What is that baby’s name? What did the werewolf do right after her birth?!)
Then came the movies, and I missed those the first round, too. But I am a sucker for autumn and will watch any Halloween-adjacent movie, and on a whim one year (spurred by a growing nostalgia online with that famous “hooa hooa” soundtrack on viral videos) I put on the first film. And I loved it.
– YouTube www.youtube.com
It might be that everything that came before primed me to enjoy these silly movies and their silly turns. I had a nostalgia of my own tied to the whole thing.
But overall, they’re really fun movies, and Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner are all good in them. They always had a good sense of humor about the storylines, too. You also get to see some really good directors like Catherine Hardwicke and David Slade work.
Both of them, by the way, have admitted the movies aren’t the greatest. Hardwick told Vulture as much in 2012.
“Every one of those scripts sucked,” she said. “Oh, Lord, did they suck.”
But she took it as a challenge.
“I thought the script was horrible, but then I looked it up on the Internet and I thought, Okay, it’s based on a book and people tend to like it. There’s gotta be something there. So I read the book, and I thought it captured that feeling of being madly in love. And I thought, That’s kind of a good challenge, to see if, as a filmmaker, I could make you feel that giddy, crazy.”
Industry analysts note that Twilight demonstrated how studios could successfully target young female demographics with franchise-worthy content. The film created a blueprint that launched The Hunger Games, Divergent, and many other YA adaptations, some of which landed and some of which flopped. But it was definitely all the rage in Hollywood.
Twilight also anticipated modern fandom culture. In 2012, the film’s Twitter account was the first to reach 1 million followers. (As I said, this was a really unique time online, and we were still deep in the trenches of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, too. Social media was still newish.)
Now, online creators who weren’t even born when the first film premiered are making Twilight content, often ironically, but still engaging with its world and characters.
TwilightCredit: Summit Entertainment
The meme-ification reveals something about “bad” art’s staying power. Twilight’s flaws—the stilted dialogue, the demon baby, the treadmill running—are cringey, but there’s something human about it. The filmmakers leaned into the cringe and took it seriously. It could have gone very wrong, although it’s clearly what fans wanted and something that continues to resonate with viewers.
Bella, where the hell have you been, loca?
The lesson here isn’t that quality doesn’t matter.
Twilight gave an underserved audience exactly what they wanted. It’s an unabashed romantic fantasy with vampires, delivered without apology.
I will probably go to the anniversary screenings, since I’ve never seen the movies on the big screen, and I’m pretty excited about it. Even “bad” movies can reshape industries. Twilight’s legacy lives on, just like those immortal sparkly vampires.
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