Working at a movie theater the past 18 months or so has provided many weekends that have been good and bad, boring along with chaotic, but nothing ever reaches the dizzying heights of fandom quite like a ‘Twilight’ opening weekend.
‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1′ opened to about 140 million dollars its’ first weekend, with 30 million of that coming from midnight showings held Thursday, Nov. 17.
Being a theater employee for the record weekend is a lot like a pee-wee football player being asked to play against the Baltimore Ravens.
The mood of the weekend was set with seven sold out showings ranging from 12:01 a.m. to 2:45 a.m. that resulted in me not leaving until about 3:30 a.m. I swore I could almost see the sun thinking about rising. It wouldn’t have been all that bad, maybe even funny in a sick way, if it wasn’t for the complete disregard for anything and everybody else that fans of the ‘Twilight’ series displayed.
‘Twilight’ is a lot like meth for kids and tweens; half the time the fans could hardly order their tickets from me because they literally couldn’t string together the words through their excitement.
“Ttttttwo to the uh, um, ah, twi,” proved to be something I heard routinely the entire weekend, with the occasional, “Two for the ‘Twlight Saga Breaking Dawn Part One!’ said with enough energy to replace a Starbucks, punctuating the hysteria.
Moms revert back to a childlike state when presented with the chance to see a glittery vampire and a man-child shirtless werewolf battle for the love of a cardboard cutout with a stutter.
The phenomenon clearly has no intention of slowing down, with the success of ‘Part One,’ you can only imagine the wheelbarrows of cash people will line up to throw at ‘Part Two.’
The desperation to see these movies as fast as humanly possible creates a chaos that the Joker would even envy. When part of your shift includes making sure people aren’t cutting in line and being yelled at for having a show at 1 p.m. sell out while a show fifteen minutes later sits just about empty. Irrationality reigns supreme and employees are left to just suffer the abuse.
The problem with all of this is the fact that this is just a movie, as much excitement as it generates, it’s a two hour glimpse at a fictional group of characters going through a typical teenage love triangle, viewing it doesn’t give you the answers to fix the economic crisis, it doesn’t feed the hungry or end any wars overseas, so why give it the weight of the world?
There’s nothing wrong with a little escapism, don’t get me wrong, we all have guilty pleasures; it’s just that you’re going to see the same movie, screaming, jumping up and down and insulting employees will not make the movie any longer or the theater any better than politely ordering a ticket and going on your way.
I’m sure this will do nothing in terms of actually calming the collective nerves of those excited to see the latest installment of this cash cow, time will eventually curb the enthusiasm, at least until the next part is released to even more hysteria as it will be the last. But until then, just keep telling yourself, “I survived opening weekend.”
