is this the first?

I know that for every smart and confident girl like her in the fandom, there no doubt several swallowing the fantasy whole, and I won’t pretend not to be uneasy about that. But I respect it as the franchise that is forcing an unwilling culture to acknowledge that there can be a female-driven juggernaut franchise.

I look forward to a future where there are enough of those to choose from that we can reject one we think is silly or problematic. In the meantime, I’m holding out hope for this one as step to making that future possible.

Twilight is aimed at teenage girls and young women. While I am sure the demographics are larger than that, the target audience really is not girls and boys; whereas in Harry Potter that was exactly the case. The Potter books were aimed at both young men and young women, and a larger demographic resulted as well, incluiding myself! (age 53)

Twilight will do very well. But please don’t think its box office and “lack of respect” is because it is a woman-helmed film. That’s just not justified at this point, and I don’t think it is justified at all. When I see a film, it’s not about the director until the credits come up. It’s about the story.

Something to keep in mind.

But on the other hand…if this series doesn’t do well, then Hollywood execs might blame the female lead and not the movie’s content…and then it will be ages before they try another female-led franchise.

So maybe it all comes back to male silliness being expected and well-tolerated (“Transformers”), and female silliness being, well, too silly.

If I remember correctly from last year, this exact thing happened when the first film came out and followed with lots of articles about how obviously girls are not going out to see films in the droves that the studios expected, etc.

I thought the first movie was pretty bland and the content incredibly appalling, but my friends and I have developed a love for trashy vampire movies and TV shows so we’ll see this eventually. Just not on opening weekend — I don’t think I could cope with the Twihards’ first experience of the new film. I’ll deal with them when they come back for seconds.

It’s in obsessive repeat viewings that this movie will make its money, so the opening weekend box office will depend on people going to see it multiple times in one weekend. I remember reading a quote about “Titanic”’s box office success where someone said “Never underestimate the power of teenage girls seeing a Leonardo DiCaprio film twelve times in theatres” (or something to that effect), and they even went on to say that this is the reason no other film will ever touch “Titanic”’s record unless the actively court the teenage female fanbase.

If I had a daughter, I would dissect the phenomena with her and point out misogyny in the story before I allowed her to even consider buying into crap like that franchise.
But, then again, I have a son who thinks the Transformers franchise was made for idiots.