Counterpoint with Cargill: Twilight and Girl Power at the Box Office Filed under ( Twilight )

Owen Gleiberman has it wrong. In fact, many of those who have come to the defense of the Twilight franchise have it wrong. In a recent piece, he argues: “The ascendance of the Twilight saga represents an essential paradigm shift in youth-gender control of the pop marketplace. For the better part of two decades, teenage boys, and overgrown teenage boys, have essentially held sway over Hollywood, dictating, to a gargantuan degree, the varieties of movies that get made…No more. With New Moon, the Twilight series is now officially as sweeping a juggernaut on the big screen as it ever was between book covers. And that gives the core audience it represents — teenage girls — a new power and prevalence.”

I’m pretty sure Owen wrote this piece almost 12 years ago. If not him, one of his other colleagues at Entertainment Weekly did. It was back in the heady early days of 1998 when a little film named Titanic began racking up box office records on the backs of teenage girls. It was a revolution, or so it seemed, and as Hollywood realized that 14-year-old girls had more disposable income than any other demographic out there, they began to tailor films to meet the desires of those popcorn-chomping teenage girls. It was only then that they were reminded of one very simple marketing fact: Teenage girls are also the single most fickle group of consumers of any demographic out there.



Teenage boys are great for marketing. What they loved as children and teenagers they will love forever. Music, toys, movies. You can sell and resell the same crap to them over and over again and they will buy it with a smile on their face. Lump together a bunch of 60-year-old action has-beens, put them in a toy commercial for a movie, pump it full of 20-year-old heavy metal rock tunes, and you’ve got yourself a blockbuster. But do the same thing for women? Pitch a Scott Baio romantic comedy with a soundtrack by New Kids on the Block and see how many calls you get back from the studios.



People don’t hate Twilight because it is a successful film series made for women. They hate Twilight for the same reason they hate Paris Hilton: We find the exaltation of mediocrity to be abhorrent. The celebration of that which we find inferior is frustrating to people who believe they can do better. And while it is not always the case that your “grandmother can make a better movie than that,” watching subpar content receive nonstop media attention can take one from a state of detached indifference and incite them to a furious lather in which they want to tear down and destroy whatever the vacuous, hollow smiles in $300 haircuts are yammering incessantly about.



And right now, that’s Twilight. And Twilight is crap.



Listen to the fans. Few like it because they actually find it really great; they like it despite itself. It is a cinematic cheeseburger: You know it’s bad for you, you know there isn’t a single healthy element in there, you even admit that there might not be a single real, organic thing in the whole burger. It is fried, gooey and dripping in fat — but you like it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I can’t refuse people their guilty pleasures. I certainly have mine. But if you don’t admit they’re guilty pleasures, you’re being disingenuous at best. And that’s what’s happening right now.



Fanboys aren’t worked into a frenzy because they’re worried about Dark Knight box office records or out of fear that the movie marketplace will soon be awash with movies about glittery veggie vampires in place of their precious giant robots. They’re upset that everywhere they turn people are talking about Twilight. Who’s been cast; where they’re filming; what the next book is about. Even the sacred male-centric geek sites have been overrun by news of the franchise.



There’s no revolution; it was an overnight coup. Twilight went from having a near record-breaking weekend to a steep decline that is one of the biggest drops in history. No. 25 with a 64 percent drop from first weekend to the next. And if there’s some sort of teen-girl uprising, where was the love for Whip It, a teen-geared, female-centric film starring Juno fave Ellen Page and directed by the multitalented Drew Barrymore? That was a great film. A chick-flick (as Gleiberman put it), to be sure, but a real steak left sweltering in the sun while everyone raced out for a cheeseburger. This is a phenomenon, nothing more. It is jelly shoes and boy bands, sequined cell phones and slap bracelets. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Source: Hollywood.com