Category Arts & Culture
Key figures Chris Weitz (director), Kristen Stewart (Bella Swan), Robert Pattinson (Edward Cullen), Taylor Lautner (Jacob Black), Stephenie Meyer (author), Summit Entertainment (producer/distributor), Wyck Godfrey (producer)
Summary
The Twilight Saga: New Moon was released theatrically on November 20, 2009, directed by Chris Weitz and based on Stephenie Meyer’s 2006 novel of the same name. The film is the second installment in the five-film Twilight series, continuing the supernatural romance between the mortal teenager Bella Swan and the vampire Edward Cullen. The plot centers on Bella’s heartbreak after Edward’s departure and her growing emotional and romantic attachment to childhood friend Jacob Black, whose werewolf identity is revealed. New Moon broke the record for the largest opening day in Hollywood history at the time—$72.7 million on November 20—and the largest opening weekend for a non-summer release—$142.8 million in its debut three days. It earned $709.7 million worldwide against a $50 million production budget, ranking as the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2009 worldwide.
Background: The Twilight Franchise in 2009
New Moon arrived as the second chapter in a franchise that had erupted with unexpected force a year earlier. The first Twilight film (directed by Catherine Hardwicke, released November 21, 2008) opened to $69.6 million domestically in its first weekend and ultimately earned $407.7 million worldwide on a $37 million budget—a return of over 11 times its production cost and a major commercial surprise for Summit Entertainment, which had acquired North American distribution rights for approximately $1 million. The success of Twilight (2008) transformed Summit from a small independent distributor into a significant studio player and confirmed Stephenie Meyer’s novels as a bankable multimedia franchise.
Meyer’s New Moon novel, published in September 2006, was already a bestseller (over 5 million copies in print by 2009 in the United States alone), and Summit green-lit the sequel immediately after Twilight’s opening weekend performance. Production on New Moon began in early 2009, with Chris Weitz replacing Catherine Hardwicke as director following reported creative and schedule conflicts.
Production and Design
The $50 million budget—nearly double that of the first film—financed several expansions:
- Visual effects: The werewolf transformation sequences, executed by Rising Sun Pictures and Tippett Studio, required months of digital animation and were a primary cost driver. The wolves in New Moon were rendered at an unprecedented scale for the franchise (each wolf standing roughly 10 feet tall) and required a new animation pipeline.
- Location shooting: Principal photography took place in Vancouver, British Columbia (doubling for the fictional town of Forks, Washington) and in Montepulciano, Italy, where the Volturi vampire coven scenes were filmed. The Italian sequences required closing public squares and managing local logistics.
- Taylor Lautner’s transformation: Lautner, cast as Jacob Black, had been considered for replacement with a larger actor after the first film due to Jacob’s physical expansion in the source novel. Lautner lobbied to keep the role and reportedly gained approximately 30 pounds of muscle during an intensive training regimen, a marketing focal point for the film.
- Score and soundtrack: Alexandre Desplat composed the orchestral score; the accompanying soundtrack album—featuring artists including Death Cab for Cutie, Thom Yorke, and Bon Iver—debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 165,000 copies in its first week.
Box Office Performance
New Moon’s commercial performance established multiple records at the time of release:
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Opening day (Nov 20, 2009) | $72.7 million (then-largest opening day ever) |
| Opening weekend (Nov 20–22) | $142.8 million (then-largest non-summer opening) |
| North America total | $296.6 million |
| International total | $413.1 million |
| Worldwide total | $709.7 million |
| Production budget | ~$50 million |
| Return on budget | ~14× |
The previous record for a November opening weekend had been set by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) at $102.7 million. New Moon shattered that benchmark by nearly $40 million, confirming the Twilight fanbase’s extraordinary organizational capacity—fans had purchased advance tickets months in advance, with some theatres selling out midnight screenings within hours of tickets going on sale.
Cultural Phenomenon
New Moon arrived at the apex of the mid-2000s vampire-romance cultural wave. The same period saw True Blood (HBO, premiered 2008) air its acclaimed second season in mid-2009 and the debut of The Vampire Diaries (The CW, premiered September 10, 2009), creating a saturated marketplace for supernatural romance across film and television. The “Team Edward” versus “Team Jacob” fan divide—borrowed from Meyer’s novels and amplified by social media on Twitter, MySpace, and nascent Facebook fan pages—became a template for franchise-era audience participation and shipping culture.
The film’s marketing campaign, coordinated by Summit’s newly empowered marketing team, broke new ground in targeting teenage and young-adult demographics: exclusive footage premieres at MTV events, partnerships with Hot Topic for merchandise, and unprecedented fan-access events during production. The New Moon premiere in Los Angeles on November 16, 2009, drew thousands of fans and generated substantial press coverage, with Entertainment Weekly, People, and Us Weekly devoting multiple cover stories to the franchise during the autumn.
Legacy and Influence on Young-Adult Adaptations
New Moon’s success—combined with the original Twilight’s performance—validated the commercial logic of adapting young-adult novel series as multi-film franchises:
- Direct successors in the franchise: Eclipse (2010, $698.5 million worldwide), Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011, $712 million), Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012, $829.7 million)
- Industry influence: Studios accelerated development of YA franchise adaptations following New Moon’s records. The Hunger Games (2012), Divergent (2014), and The Maze Runner (2014) all followed the Twilight template of multi-book-to-multi-film adaptations aimed at teenage demographics
- Paranormal romance genre: The film’s success embedded supernatural romance as a commercially proven genre for young-adult adaptations, influencing publishers, agents, and studio acquisition strategies for the following decade
Significance
New Moon’s release represented the zenith of mid-2000s teen vampire romance in popular culture and the Twilight franchise’s peak commercial dominance. The franchise demonstrated the power of a passionate, organized fanbase to drive record-breaking theatrical performance and validated the model of literary franchises adapted for teenage and young-adult audiences. Taylor Lautner’s expanded role and physical transformation became a marketing landmark. The film’s cultural saturation—its posters, merchandise, and fan debates present in schools, malls, and early social media throughout late 2009—marked a distinct moment in franchise-era popular culture that studios and publishers subsequently attempted to replicate throughout the 2010s.
Sources
- Wikipedia: “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Saga:_New_Moon
- Box Office Mojo: The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) — opening day, opening weekend, worldwide gross. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt1259571/
- Variety: “New Moon Breaks November Records,” November 21, 2009
- The Hollywood Reporter: “Twilight franchise — by the numbers,” 2012
- Billboard: New Moon soundtrack chart performance, November 2009