Remember when the Twilight movies were major events? Neither does Kevthewriter.

For a new spin-off of Why’d it Bomb?, I’m looking at movies and other media that were hits in their time but nowadays hardly anyone talks about them and wonder what happened that made everyone forget about it. Considering it’s October, let’s take a look at something with vampires and werewolves in it.

In the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, Twilight was either everyone’s favorite book/film series or everyone’s favorite punching bag as it seemed to have an equal number of fans (or “twihards”) to haters. Twilight fandom and hate was so massive that, for the longest time, you couldn’t go anywhere without people either talking about whether Edward or Jacob was better or making fun of sparkly vampires. Even teenagers, the target audience of the series, were getting in on the hate. Nowadays, though, both the haters and the fans have quieted down and no one really talks about Twilight anymore. Even the sparkly vampire jokes have subsided. But what happened? Why are you unlikely to really see anyone talk/joke about Twilight anymore?

I think it’s due to one thing: The Hunger Games stole its thunder. From 2008-2012, Twilight was the big YA franchise and, due to it being so popular, a lot of people were talking about it. But then The Hunger Games came out and, unlike Twilight, the majority of people weren’t reading the books or watching the movies just to make fun of them but actually legitimately enjoying the series. And most can agree that at the very least the first two Hunger Games movies were good.

Due to the widespread popularity The Hunger Games received, everyone shifted their focus from Twilight to The Hunger Games and suddenly everyone stopped making fun of Twilight and started getting actually invested into The Hunger Games‘ plot. This even led many movie studios to stop trying to rip off Twilight (Beautiful Creatures, The Mortal Instruments, Beastly, etc.) and they started ripping off The Hunger Games (Divergent, The Maze Runner, etc.). It probably didn’t help Twilight that the first Hunger Games movie came out when the last Twilight movie, Breaking Dawn Part 2, came out nor did it help that the subsequent Hunger Games films came out when they weren’t producing anymore Twilight films. That just gave Hunger Games even more time to pretty much steal Twilight‘s thunder.

Of course, while The Hunger Games is much better than Twilight, it did have a similar impact as, like Twilight, all of the attempts by other studios to create a big YA dystopian franchise didn’t go over so well. It did better as at least Divergent and Maze Runner were successful enough to produce sequels (while Beautiful Creatures and Mortal Instruments weren’t) but those sequels didn’t exactly do as well and, nowadays, there isn’t really a big YA franchise playing at the movies right now.

But, that all being said, the reason you don’t hear about Twilight much anymore is that, well, everyone turned their attention to The Hunger Games and, being a better series and all, it ended up having a more lasting impact.

Thankfully, everyone forgetting Twilight ended up being a pretty good deal for Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson because now they pretty much act in independent films but those films showed, unlike Twilight, that they can actually act and, while the general public might always see them as Edward and Bella, anyone who sees their more recent films will now know there’s more to them than that.

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