Vamp tale ‘Twilight’ seeks blockbuster bite

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.

"It's early teens to up above 50-year-olds," said Rick Butler, Fandango's chief operating officer. "Some of the daughters have encouraged the mothers to see it. Mothers have heard about it and read the novels themselves and want to take their daughters."

Summit has three potential sequels to make if "Twilight" does well enough, so the studio has sought to expand the audience further to pack in young males.

"I feel like girls, the ones who are fans of the book, are going to go see it several times," said Stewart, who starred in the horror tale "The Messengers" and appeared in Sean Penn's "Into the Wild." "But it's funny how the trailers now, they're obviously trying to target boys and make it, like, more full of action."

A solid male audience seems possible, considering "Twilight" features a studly male with superpowers, a pack of ravenous bloodsuckers and fetching young women, both human and vampire.

"I don't see it as only girl-oriented, because I think guys really like vampires, too, and they like hot girls," Hardwicke said. "When we've shown it to our little family and friends screenings, the boys liked it as much as the girls. Just because the early adopters, the first ones that read it, were girls, I don't think it needs to stay there.

"If you're a guy and you want to pick up chicks, you should go see `Twilight.'"

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