Why Is Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Failing To Grab Repeat Viewers?

Love or hate Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, you know it’s an instant money-maker. So why is it that the fourth installment of the film series is seeing a drop in repeat viewers? Summit Entertainment has a few thoughts. 

There were no new releases in theaters this weekend and Breaking Dawn stayed on top of the box office making an additional $16.9 million. “After 17 days in theaters, the fourth installment in the series has grossed an impressive $247.3 million in North America. Still, that’s slightly lower than the $255.4 million the third Twilight film, New Moon, grossed during the same time period in 2009,” writes the LA Times. The last film, Eclipse, was released in June and is therefor harder to compare.

Summit Entertainment’s Domestic Distribution President Richie Fay spoke to the paper about why he thinks Breaking Dawn isn’t doing as well. “I think our audience has grown a little bit older, and therefore their interests have changed,” he said. “That audience was also a big repeat audience, so maybe this time they’ve only seen the movie once, when they would have seen it 4 1/2 times before.”

I’m not entirely sure where he’s getting his fancy figures from but it’s an interesting thought. I don’t know if I’d agree with the audience getting older being a factor, after all, Twilight fans are known to be pretty rabid, but perhaps it’s the anticipation that’s getting in the way? The film ends on a cliffhanger and maybe that’s just too much for fans to put themselves through repeatedly. Who knows, maybe they just didn’t like this one as much.

So, we’d like to ask our Twilight-fan readers – yes, we know you’re out there, we did a reader survey, you know – did you see Breaking Dawn more than once or are you planning to? And just as a general question, do you regularly see movies in the theater more than once? My personal weakness are the Harry Potter films, I always see them two or three times.

(via LA Times)

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Jill Pantozzi

Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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