Girl-meets-boy stories are not the usual stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, even when it's girl-meets-vampire.
Neither are stories created by women, with a predominantly female audience, shot on a bargain budget with a cast of relative unknowns and released by an independent distributor.
Yet Summit Entertainment has good reason to believe that 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's far from the special-effects extravaganzas that dominate the movie business. It was shot for $37 million, a pittance compared with big studio movies.
What Twilight does offer is epic star-crossed romance, melodrama, peril, an attractive young cast and an action-packed finale. But mostly, it has perhaps the most passionate fan base of any literary adaptation since Harry Potter.
"It's like a little bizarre, little perfect-storm phenomenon," said Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, who began working on the project less than two years ago. "I knew some people loved it, but I didn't 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, Wash., 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.
Bella and Edward must keep their passion in check so he won't succumb to the desire to drink her blood. Meantime, he protects Bella from a 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 in the Twilight fold, drawn in by the all-consuming obsessiveness of Bella and Edward's forbidden love.
"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, who played Cedric Diggory in two Harry Potter films. "It seems like it's something like a fan-fiction thing, which was never intended to be read by anyone."
That was the intention of Meyer, who wrote Twilight at night while her husband and children slept.
"No one was going to read it except for me. That's 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's what writing is."
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