For Maria Anslee and her two teenage daughters, Ali and Rachel, Twilight could not come fast enough.

They had already spent a joyous hour queuing outside a West Los Angeles multiplex, singing, along with dozens of other women, tunes from the soundtrack of the hit new vampire film that features Robert Pattinson, the British Harry Potter actor, as Edward, a Byronic bloodsucker.

This was, said Maria, a 38-year-old legal secretary, the best time she had had with with her daughters for years. “We all love Edward: he is cool, yet a gentleman. And Bella, his human girlfriend, is nerdy and sweet. We are rooting for them to get together. It’s all we have been talking about for weeks.”

And there was a bonus: “My husband was not invited. He is back at home, fixing the refrigerator. This is not his kind of thing - not enough violence or car chases.”

Twilight: The vampire bites back

Watch out for that creaky coffin lid... the toothy ones are set to invade our screens once more, says Wendy Ide

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BACKGROUND

• Stephenie Meyer's Twilight book scrapped after Internet leak

• Fancy man: Robert Pattinson

• Harry Potter goodie Robert Pattinson finds vampire fame

• The sexless vampire who’s so seductive

• Hollywood goes girly

BACKGROUND

• Twilight

Last week girl power ensured that Twilight, based on the best-selling novels by Stephenie Meyer, made its entire budget back on its first day in US cinemas, earning $70m over its opening weekend. That is $3m more than the latest Bond, Quantum of Solace, had earned in America the previous weekend - a triumph of oestrogen over testosterone.

Twilight, which opens here this week, is being hailed as part of a seismic shift in Hollywood thinking. Leaving aside such freak events as The Dark Knight, propelled partly by a morbid curiosity about the late Heath Ledger’s final performance, 2008 has been the year of the once-derided chick flick.

From Sex and the the City and Mamma Mia! to High School Musical 3 and the forthcoming Confessions of a Shopaholic, the multiplex is turning girlie.

Traditionally, chick flicks have ranked even below B-movie splatterfests in both budget and prestige. The mould was broken in 1997 by Titanic. James Cameron’s movie was a massive gamble, costing a then-unthinkable $200m but it made 10 times that at cinemas alone. Studios noted that women often went first with their dates then, as with Twilight and Sex and the City, came back again with their girl friends from the office or parent groups.

It was a freakish film, however. Films are budgeted by how many of the four demographic “quadrants” - women under 25 and over 25, men under 25 and over 25 - they attract. One is vital, two is great, but Titanic crossed all four, again and again, with its combination of the love story between Kate W i n s l e t a n d L e o n a r d o DiCaprio, and its amazing special effects. The problem for the studios was how do you replicate the success of a film where the real star is a ship that sinks. They were stumped.

A 2005 internal memo from the Warner Brothers studio highlighted the issue: “Many women do not go to movies unless they are taking the kids.

They want more than flat rom-coms [romantic comedies] or feminist tracts about spunky teachers, but we are failing to work out what that is. Ideas, please!”

Warner was overlooking a quiet revolution that was taking place in the home, and it was just as much about men as women.

“Young men, once the most important demographic for the film studios, have turned away from movies and stopped watching television, preferring to cocoon themselves with video games,” explained Paul Dergarabedian, whose company Media By Numbers, quanti-fies such trends for Hollywood.

The trend is incontrovertible. Ten years ago men under 18 went to the cinema six times a month, now they barely see a “live” movie once a week. The numbers of women over 25 going to the cinema has risen by 9% since 2004.

These women were changing the way they watch films, too. In the same year as the Warners memo went out, In Her Shoes, a modest-budget comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette as battling siblings, sold $32m tickets at the US box-office but reaped another $36m in video and DVD sales as women gathered for “shoe parties” where they drank cocktails and celebrated the sisters’ contrasting styles.

Word of the grassroots success of In Her Shoes encouraged Fox to bankroll The Devil Wears Prada. It was an urban fairytale that checked every box. It had a literary pedigree and a witty script. It was another rags to riches plot for Anne Hathaway, who had already won over teens with The Princess Diaries; it had a richly wicked role for Meryl Streep as the boss from hell, based on the legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour. And, perhaps most importantly, a blizzard of high-fashion brand names.

After years of declining ticket sales to women, Prada paved the golden road to this year’s critical mass of chick-flicks which all share a common sensibility - quirky, escapist but finishing with an upbeat moral resolution that Everywoman can not only have it all, but also do it in high heels.

Many also had characters of different generations in the Hathaway-Streep mould to whom daughters and their mothers could relate, making it a “two quadrant” movie.

In recessional times, chick flicks will also be more attractive to studios because they are cheaper to produce than special-effects-laden films that appeal to men.

Sex and the City was a £40m film that took £260m at the global box office. Mamma Mia! has outdone it, taking £370m worldwide, yet costing only £35m to make – and that’s before the DVD sales, which topped 1.7m on its first day of release in Britain last week.

So next year will see a flood of “me too” chick flicks, largely starring Hathaway. She plays a woman who dumps her boyfriend to find herself (The Fiance), who finds an old friend has scheduled her wedding on the same day as herself (Bride Wars), and a commitment-shy lawyer holding off a wedding-obsessed boyfriend (The Opposite of Love).

There are many more: Hilary Swank is producing French Women Don’t Get Fat, another book turned film, where a spoilt champagne company manager learns life lessons, and Drew Barrymore is producing He’s Just Not That Into You, again where the strong, smart attractive female protagonists realise men are a slippery worthless breed who must be beaten into shape.

The ultimate accolade is on the way too - a parody called Chick Flick which, according to the studio blurb, shows “what might have happened if Thelma and Louise had been a little more showbusiness-orientated. A little PMS and a big gun is all it takes to make it big in Hollywood”.

All in all, there is at least $1 billion-worth of two-quard-ant movies in the pipeline, compared to $250m-worth of such films produced in 2004, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

And while many will flop - like The Women, a witless 2008 remake of a classic 1939 social satire of the same name, proving that the chick-flick pioneer Meg Ryan now lacks the quadrant-crossing appeal of Hathaway - there will be enough lipstick-smudged hits to bank a few more dollars.

“We are going to see a lot more female-orientated movies in the future,” said Dergarabedian. “Hollywood has cracked the code: there is gold in them handbags.”

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