If you follow culture at all, I am sure you have heard of the movie, Twilight. It opens Friday, is setting or breaking all kinds of pre-sales records, and is on track for a 60+ million OPENING weekend.
Why am I writing about this? What does this have to do with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell?
Well, the movie has no stars in it, was made independently after several studios tried it but fucked it up, and is based on a very successful book that has a cult following, but got very little mainstream press and made up for it with a strong internet presence.
Sound familiar?
It's funny to watch Hollywood execs try to wrap their heads around something new:
"In the age of big, studio tentpole pictures, it's a surprise to find such encouragingly strong advance ticket sales for an independent film with no established boxoffice stars," Fandango COO Rick Butler said. "That's a tribute to power of the blockbuster novel, solid word-of-mouth on the movie's early screenings and savvy Internet marketing."
This comes as no surprise to those of us who, instead of just blindly accepting conventional wisdom, actually look at the evidence.
This is great news because the similarities between Twilight and Beer in Hell are definitely going to help us with distributor negotiations and other things like that. Hollywood is all about imitating success, and this success is coming at a great time for my movie.
That being said, I don't want to go too crazy with the comparison here, the Twilight series of books (there are four of them) has sold over 17 million copies worldwide. Just the first book in the series has sold like 2 million copies domestically, which is way, way more than the 500k copies my book has sold. When the Twilight actors show up somewhere, they draw so many people they have to leave. When I do a speech at a college, I usually only draw a few thousand, and I have yet to incite a riot.
But there is one thing my movie has that Twilight doesn't: The potential to be a multi-quadrant hit.
In figuring out who the audience for a movie is, you think of it in four basic blocks: young men, young women, old men, old women. Twilight will dominate the young women quadrant, but have very weak crossover to other quadrants. My movie in contrast, will dominate the young male quadrant, but, judging by the emails I get and who buys my books, will also have excellent play in both the old male and young female quadrant.
What does all this mean for this movie? We'll see. Until the returns are in, the prognostications are worth what you are paying for them: Nothing. We'll see what happens, but the success of Twilight is very encouraging for the success of this movie.
Digg it · del.icio.us · StumbleUpon · Fark It · Print Friendly
