’Twilight’ time: Vamp story seeks blockbuster bite

Neither are stories created by women, for a predominantly female audience, shot on a bargain budget with a cast of relative unknowns and released by an independent distributor trying to establish a niche among Hollywood's half-dozen studio behemoths.

Yet Summit Entertainment has good reason to believe "Twilight" will have more box-office bite than your typical teen soap about an awkward high school babe and her cool new mystery beau.

"Twilight" has a few stunts and clever visuals, but it is far from the special-effects extravaganzas that dominate the movie business. It was shot for $37 million, a pittance compared with big studio movies that can cost four or five times more.

Most passionate fan base
What "Twilight" does offer is epic star-crossed romance, melodrama, peril, an attractive young cast and an action-packed finale. But mostly, it has arguably the most passionate fan base of any literary adaptation since that of Harry Potter.

"It is like a little bizarre, little perfect-storm phenomenon," said "Twilight" director, Catherine Hardwicke, who began working on the project less than two years ago and has since seen the books grow from earnest cult status to having a rabid international fan base. "I knew some people loved it, but I did not know it would get this kind of crazy buzz."

"Twilight" tells the story of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), an introspective teen who moves from sunny Phoenix to cloudy Forks, Washington, to live with her divorced dad. At her new school, she is swept up in a supernatural romance with aloof Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), part of a family of eternally young vampires fighting their nature by refusing to feed off humans.

Danger looms. Bella and Edward must keep their passion in check so he will not succumb to the desire to drink her blood. In the meantime, he and his family are forced into action to protect Bella against a savage band of roving vampires.

The chief creative forces behind "Twilight" are women. Director Hardwicke, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg ('Step Up," TV's "Dexter") and author Stephenie Meyer, whose four books in the "Twilight" series have sold 18 million copies.

Schoolgirls were the first to be drawn into the "Twilight" fold, by the all-consuming obsessiveness of Bella and Edward's forbidden love. "Twilight" reads like a confessional, a young girl's diary loaded with compulsive detail and teen angst.

"I was convinced before I ever met Stephenie that she was a mad person who completely believed she was Bella, and this was just her fantasy," said Pattinson, best known for playing Cedric Diggory in two of the "Harry Potter" films. "It is kind of like voyeurism ... It seems like it is something of a fan-fiction thing, which was never intended to be read by anyone."

That was the exact intention of Meyer, who wrote "Twilight" late at night while her husband and children slept. Inspired by a dream she had about a "normal girl and a beautiful vampire that was in love with her and wanted to kill her," Meyer said she created the story for an audience of one. "No one was going to read it except for me. That is probably why it comes across as so intimate," Meyer said.

"It was a story I wrote for one person to be exactly what I wanted to read at that point in my life, the escape that I wanted. And I stepped into this character's shoes, who was very different from me, and I got to live someone else's life. For me, that is what writing is."

Things happened fast once she decided to publish "Twilight." Even before the book came out, Hollywood came calling. An early version of the script turned the intimate story into a standard action movie, with Bella transformed from solitary teen to an outgoing track star who ends up "strapping on a gun and night vision goggles to go vampire hunting," Meyer said.

Summit Entertainment, a production outfit that had just expanded to film distribution, took over the project after it was shelved by MTV Films. Hardwicke, who made the acclaimed teen drama "Thirteen," came on board to direct, and the gun-toting Bella was scrapped in favor of a faithful adaptation of Meyer's novel.

Since then, the project has taken a seemingly charmed course. Sales of the books have surged. The audience has broadened from girls to include older women. And another teenager, Harry Potter, graciously moved out of Bella's way.

In late summer, Warner Bros. decided to bump "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," from Nov. 21 to next July. Summit then moved "Twilight" from its Dec. 12 release to Nov. 21, grabbing a prime date just before Thanksgiving, one of the busiest weekends of the year at movie theaters in the United States.

"Twilight" will have to contend with the Disney family flick "Bolt," an animated canine adventure opening the same day and featuring the voices of John Travolta and teen idol Miley Cyrus. No one in Hollywood expects "Twilight" to put up numbers anywhere near a "Harry Potter," whose five installments have averaged $90 million over opening weekends.

Total $48.8 mln
Yet in a single weekend, "Twilight" could wind up matching or exceeding the total $48.8 million total domestic grosses of Summit's first five releases over their entire runs. Since debuting a year ago with the fright flick "P2," Summit's receipts have ranged from $1 million for the Christina Ricci fairy tale "Penelope" to $24.8 million for the martial-arts thriller "Never Back Down."

"The Hollywood prognosticators, we are really trying to tune it out," said Erik Feig, president of production at Summit. "What is great is we go into this being very, very happy with the film, so whatever it does, we are going to be thrilled with it. Whatever that number is, we do believe people who are going to see the movie are going to like it."

Girls and women are expected to dominate the audience, making "Twilight" a rare female-driven franchise. Females accounted for 89 percent of advance "Twilight" sales at MovieTickets.com, said Joel Cohen, the company's executive vice president.

Sales for "Twilight" have been brisk, with MovieTickets.com and competitor Fandango.com reporting hundreds of shows already sold out more than a week in advance. Both companies reported that "Twilight" initially was outselling "Quantum of Solace," even though the new James Bond flick opened a week earlier.

A survey of ticket buyers on Fandango.com found that nearly half of the people interested in seeing "Twilight" were over 25.