HiFi Writer Blog

There can be no doubt that The Twilight Saga movies have been financial successes, nor that they are chick flicks, if this term is defined not as a romantic comedy, but as a movie that appeals significantly more to females, on average, than to males. What’s interesting is that the makers appear to have recognised this and stuck with their strengths, rather than trying to even it up.

My evidence for this?

Here is the IMDB voting screen for the first installment, Twilight (average score 5.7):

And here is the same screen for number 2, New Moon (4.6):

As you can see, both male and female votes fell, but the male ones far more sharply, opening up the sex gap from 1.4 to 1.9. Now here are the early figures for the third movie, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (4.5):

Yes, the girls actually like it more than the first one, while the guys like it less than the second. The gap is now 3.3. I included the age categories under this one so that you can see it is consistent for the sexes. And I don’t think it’s anything to do with acting, cinematography or such. The surprisingly extreme dichotomy of votes suggests that you either ‘get it’, in which case you give it ’10’, or you don’t ‘get it’.

Females tend to get it:

Males basically don’t:

I was going to entitle this post ‘The Fall of M Night Shyamalan‘, but he actually made a couple of movies before The Sixth Sense.

Yesterday my brother and I were discussing the disappointment of The Happening (to be fair, my contribution was based on what I have read, because I haven’t even seen it). Shyamalan’s most recent one, The Last Airbender is out in cinemas right now. Let’s have a little look over the IMDB score of each of his nine movies, in order of release, and remember that the first two were not much seen.

Perhaps he should take to time out and try to recapture what he had with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.

Well, yesterday I made some remarks about the new Toy Story movie. Last night I watched the original Toy Story on Blu-ray, and after not having seen it for several years, it still stands up very nicely, and looks gorgeous. Could this really have been the first ever computer-animated feature film? It looks far too mature for that.

As to the new one, I predicted that the IMDB front page score would fall — it hasn’t yet, but give it time — and that there would be both upwards and downwards pressure on the weighted score, shown on the Top 250 list. So far, the pressure seems to have been upwards. It has ascended to #11 with a weighted score of 8.8/10.

I still think it will droop a little over the long term, just on the grounds of having watched the scores of many movies doing the same. But, then, I haven’t seen the movie yet.

Someone who has, and who is always worth reading, is James Lileks. His discussion makes me think it may well remain right up there. Read his next blog post as well. The second half concerns the role of masculine role models in Pixar movies, and you can see why I love reading him. The construction of this section is brilliant.

I think I may have to take my 3D glasses to the cinema next week.

Update (23 June 2010, 9:35am): The front page has finally started to diminish (down to 9.3 from 9.4), while the Top 250 standing continues to rise (from #11 to #8), although the weighted score remains the same at 8.8, presumably due to rounding.

Update 2 (5 July 2010, 6:44pm): Front page: 9.1. Top 250: #6 on 8.9.