In the years following the massive success of the Harry Potter franchise, the rival studios around Hollywood rushed to gather up as many YA properties as humanly possible to turn into movies, in a transparent ploy to try and capitalize on Warner Bros.’ cultural juggernaut.
The decade that followed saw the box office graveyard littered with countless adaptations that stumbled out of the gate and fell at the first hurdle, and the only two that came anywhere close to replicating Potter‘s multi-billion dollar commercial success were The Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga.
However, unlike J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World that appealed to every demographic and age group, there were two distinct schools of thought on Twilight. A lot of people dismissed the franchise as poorly-made and tedious romances packed with wooden acting, unconvincing effects and an utterly terrifying CGI baby, while the fans were all-in to the point of hysteria.
Both teenage girls and middle-aged Karens alike went Twilight-mad, and as bad as the movies were to those that didn’t have a connection to the source material, you couldn’t deny that the big screen series had certainly captured the zeitgeist. The proof is right there in the numbers, with the five installments earning over $3.3 billion at the box office despite none of them securing a Rotten Tomatoes score any higher than 49%.
With author Stephanie Myer having recently released new book Midnight Sun, the terrifying prospect of a second wave of Twilight mania can’t be ruled out, especially with the entire collection arriving on Hulu next month, on September 1st, for longtime fans to revisit and entirely new ones to discover. However, no matter what your opinions are on The Twilight Saga, you can at least rest easy in the fact that nobody seems to like it less than star Robert Pattinson.