Last year we celebrated the 10 year anniversary of the first Twilight film, which brought a wave of glorious Twilight memes out of the woodwork. Officially dubbed, ‘The Twilight Renaissance’, the once-belittled franchise fandom is now proudly reclaiming the pop culture phenomenon.
Great news fanpires – it's officially cool to like Twilight now. Get the low-down on the 'Twilight Renaissance' in this week's episode of News To Me.
Posted by GOAT on Thursday, 22 November 2018
We’ve already rolled onto the 10 year anniversary of the Twilight sequel: New Moon, and now even Robert Pattinson is showing the franchise the respect it deserves. Finally.
In an interview published on Wednesday, April 3, R.Patz admitted to USA Today that when he recently watched New Moon on TV it wasn’t the awful experience he was expecting it to be.
“It genuinely does have an incredibly good soundtrack. I completely forgot, but the soundtracks were quite ahead of their time.” he said.
“It seems like with younger people in their late teens, early 20s, it’s sort of become quite a hip thing to like,” Pattinson says. “It’s a fascinating second wave of people appreciating it, which is kind of cool.” he continued.
‘I think when anything becomes a massive phenomenon, there’s always people who get annoyed because it’s just everywhere. But now it seems like a retro thing: the soundtrack, the fashion. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so late 2000s.’ ”
In spite of landing the coveted lead role of Edward Cullen in the franchise, Robert Pattinson was always openly negative about the franchise itself. He once said he would “mindlessly hate” it if he were an average moviegoer, and shared plenty of other comments with the same sentiment.
It’s fair for Pattinson to have his own opinion, and his experience was no-doubt shaped by the the anxiety both he and his co-star (and then-girlfriend) Kristen Stewart admitted they faced during the rabid fan and media obsession with their on and off-screen relationship. Also, the Twilight franchise was decidedly not the height of cinema, and no one is pretending that it was.
But it was a shame that the person who was lucky enough to play a character so beloved by such a huge, mostly female, fandom, took part in belittling the thing they loved. The trivialisation of women’s interests saturated the Twilight phenomenon, and the fact that an attitude of self-deprecation came from within the franchise from our leading man didn’t help.
Thankfully, now that the craziness around Edward Cullen and the whole Twilight saga has died down, Robert Pattinson has admitted that he has a real appreciation for the experience and the fandom.
“It’s lovely now that the mania is not so intense,” Pattinson says. “People come up (to me) and just have very fond memories of it. It’s a really sweet thing. I think the only scary part was right in the thick of it all, when it was very, very intense. Now the intensity has died down and it’s just very warm memories.”
It might be 10 years too late, but it feels validating that the Twilight fandom finally has the love and support of Robert Pattinson, forever our moody vampire boyfriend.