At the end of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, Bella and Edward promise each other that they will be together and love each other forever. Forever is a long time, and while I can’t speak to their current relationship status, the love fans have for the Twilight franchise burns as brightly as ever nearly seven years after the last film’s release. This is evident because apparently The Twilight Saga is a hit on Hulu.
Although we don’t often get a lot of clear insight into viewership numbers from streaming services, when you do hear something, it’s usually good. Such is the case with the Twilight films, which arrived on Hulu on January 1. Hulu revealed to Decider that approximately 5,000 of its subscribers binged all five movies in the saga on New Year’s Day. That shows that these hardcore fans were probably waiting for the films to drop and could think of no better way to spend the holiday than with the popular franchise.
Those 5,000 were just the Hulu subscribers and Twilight fans who had the most ambitious binging aspirations. Over 135,000 Hulu subscribers finished all five films within the first week of their availability on the now primarily Disney-owned service. There is clearly still a passionate Twilight fandom out there and likely some new Twi-hards as well considering how streaming services allow for people to discover things they might have missed.
Hulu also provided some insight into who was spending all this time with Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, and the most common age of Twilight streamers was 20 year old. That makes sense considering that those watchers would have been 9 when the first Twilight film released in 2008 and they essentially grew up with the franchise. Nostalgic properties are powerful value propositions for streaming services and Hulu has one in Twilight.
As you might expect, 63% of those who streamed The Twilight Saga on Hulu were females. The other 37% were dudes being forced to watch it (I kid). The combined heartthrob power of Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson persists. If only more Twilight fans would follow all the great work in smaller films Robert Pattinson has done since then. Maybe if he’s the next Batman, those who like seeing him as a brooding creature of the night will tune in.
Although The Twilight Saga anecdotally doesn’t seem to have maintained the pop culture relevance it once had, the series’ success on Hulu is a reminder that this franchise was no fluke. Over five films from 2008 to 2012, fans of the franchise and Stephenie Meyer’s books flocked to theaters to the tune of $1.36 billion domestic and $3.34 billion worldwide.
Twilight’s performance on Hulu shows that should the studio one day decide to pursue a reboot of the property or tell more stories in that world, they can point to these numbers and the continued fan enthusiasm as evidence that such an endeavor could be successful.
For all this year’s new movies hoping to have similar success, check out our 2019 Release Schedule.
