'New Moon' and women's sexuality

Due to New Moon's record-smashing box office over its debut weekend this past weekend, I think I have no choice but to offer my own commentary on the latest Twilight movie offering. I should preface everything by saying that I have neither read nor seen any Twilight books or movies, but I'm not commenting on the depth (LOL!) of the plots or characters so I think I'm good.

In its first three days of release, New Moon made $142.8 million. In case you live under an economic rock, that's a fuck-ton of money. So much so that it's the third best opening ever. The only two movies with better debuts are comic book movies (The Dark Night and Spider-Man 3), while the movie that got knocked out of third place was about pirates (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest). Not only that, but these three other movies were released during the summer. Here's some movie trivia for you: big-budget blockbusters are usually released during the summer months because they have a better chance at making more money. By comparison, movies released during the slower months can top the weekend box office with about $15 million or less (for example, Sept 4-7, 2009; Feb 27-Mar 1, 2009; and Apr 4-6, 2008). Movies in the weekend box office pole position generally make in the $30-60 million range (don't quote me on that), so there's a significant difference.

Okay, so there's the non-summer-release box office smashing going on, but there's also another factor that we need to look at. Dark Night, Spider-Man 3, and Pirates all have appeal to both male and female audiences. Not to stereotype too much, but there's some action for the guys and some romance for the girls. You would think with a Batman movie, the audience would be overwhelmingly male; however, for the debut weekend, only 52 percent of the audience was male. With Pirates, the audience was "equally divided" between males and females. I couldn't find gender percentage data for the Spider-Man movie. But with New Moon, the audience was 80 fucking percent female. So if you're male and you went to see New Moon this past weekend, you were outnumbered 1 to 4. That $142.8 million was carried mostly by women.

Now I can't claim to know what the appeal of the movie is or why so many more women than men are appealed, but I'm going to try to theorize. I say that it's the "sex appeal" of the the two leading actors Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. (Does anyone even know the name of the lead actress?) They have been gracing the covers of so many tween girl (and other) magazines for the past few months that it would be shocking if New Moon didn't make as much money as it did with so much easy publicity. Factor in the widespread critical panning of the movie, and you cannot honestly say people flocked to the movie because it was good. It was due to Pattinson's and Lautner's "hotness" (I put this in quotes because I'm still confused about their hotness ... I don't really think they're that hot. Twi-fan women....).

Of course, the implications here aren't too uplifting. Have hot, sexy, shirtless guys that want to do absolutely anything for the love of a girl put into a movie, and SUPERCRAZYFANGIRLS will ensure the movie's financial success. If you have a bunch of hot, sexy, scantily-scad ladies swarming over one man in a movie by offering to his love slave, what's going to happen? 1) Feminists will go batshit crazy. 2) Where are the death-defying action scenes? 3) Guys have porn for this. (Okay, I'm kidding on number 3 here, but I can't imagine such a meager plot widely-appealing to male audiences. Of course, I might be biased.)

So my question here would be as follows: If we can essentially boil down the appeal of New Moon to the (demure) sex appeal of lead actors ("demure" because, well, is there even any nudity or sex in the movies??), then aren't women's sexualities more visually-based than normally thought-of (i.e., men and women aren't really that mentally-different sexually)? Can women really be this shallow?

Related articles that I didn't use:

• From Dracula to Edward: The changing face of vampires: Interesting article showing the gradual sexualization of the Vampire in pop culture
• The Oatmeal blog post: How Twilight Works: This guy actually read most of one of the Twilight books and maybe saw a movie or two
  

Unrelated, but here is (one of) my guilty pleasure(s) Australian singer Anthony Callea. He's done other things since this video, but I became a fan of him from this 2004 Australian Idol performance of his of "The Prayer." The single still holds the record the for the highest- and fastest-selling single in Australia.