‘Twilight’ Was Always a Beautifully Weird Indie in Blockbuster Clothing

When people think of the first Twilight movie, their minds inevitably drift not to an action sequence or special-effects-driven set piece, but to the baseball scene. That’s where we learn that vampires can only engage in America’s favorite pastime during a heavy storm, because their super-speed and strength capabilities can only be sheathed beneath thunder and lightning. The two-and-a-half minute scene relies on a moody blue filter, some in-camera slo-mo, and Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole.” In between takes, the cast say they speculated about the production’s fate. “We were like, ‘Man, I wonder if anybody’s going to see this film,’” Peter Facinelli, who played coven patriarch Carlisle Cullen, has previously said. “We were doing this little vampire movie in the woods.”

Based on Stephanie Meyers’s best-selling novel, the film premiered in November 2008 to $69 million in its opening weekend, eventually grossing more than $400 million worldwide. It was a box office hit for indie studio Summit Entertainment and spawned four more films based on Meyers’s books—2009’s New Moon, 2010’s Eclipse, 2011’s Breaking Dawn–Part 1, and 2012’s Breaking Dawn–Part 2. The franchise generated more than $3 billion total and spawned other YA franchises like The Hunger Games and Divergent, as well as the Fifty Shades franchise, which was based on Twilight fan fiction.

The series was unavoidably popular, but also easy to poke fun at. Because it was created by and for women, the plot was often reduced to the love triangle between Kristen Stewart’s mortal Bella, Robert Pattinson’s vampire Edward, and Taylor Lautner’s werewolf Jacob. Movie marketing fueled by the Team Edward versus Team Jacob debate didn’t help matters. Fifteen years before the pop cultural dominance and subsequent respect earned by ventures like Barbie or Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, even valid criticism of Twilight was drowned out by the prevailing notion that art targeted towards a predominantly female audience should be stigmatized.

Tides started to turn in 2020 with the publication of a new Twilight book from Meyer, a Netflix streaming deal for the original films, and a global pandemic that had the world indoors and eager to escape. The rise of TikTok, where the Twilight hashtag has upwards of 28 billion views, gave way to nostalgic trends about the movies. Those who once felt shame about their fandom could reclaim the movies, and those who weren’t old enough to experience the initial fervor were exposed to Twilight secondhand. Take this comment under a clip of the movie’s baseball scene on YouTube: “POV: you saw a TikTok recreation and came to check how accurate it was.”

Evidence of Twilight’s endurance is plentiful. Fans are flocking to Forks, Washington (where the series takes place) in record numbers. “In 2022 we had the biggest year, tourism-wise that we’ve had since 2010, and we’ve already beat out those numbers as of this September,” Lissy Andros, the executive director of the Forks Chamber of Commerce, recently told Wired. “Probably 65% of visitors to Forks come because of Twilight.”