What began as a relatively unambitious programming idea at our cinema in York – a triple bill of films with a particular actor as the common link – has exploded into something of a national event.
20th June 2009 is now officially ROBERT PATTINSON DAY at Picturehouse Cinemas. I don’t think any of us had any idea how much of a star this Pattinson guy was. For the uninitiated (and there are probably only two of you out there now), Robert Pattinson is the young British actor who played Cedric Diggory in a couple of Harry Potter films. No? He played Art, a struggling musician who convinces the author of a self-help tome to come and live with him and his folks in HOW TO BE. Not that one either?
What about last month’s LITTLE ASHES, an arthouse pic that explores the relationship between Salvador Dalí and the poet Federico García Lorca. He plays Dalí. Still no? Well that, plus a couple of bad adverts, is pretty much the extent of Pattinson’s CV.
Oh, and TWILIGHT of course, last year’s blockbuster in which Pattinson plays Edward Cullen, a sultry sexy vampire, adapted from Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling novel. I must confess to missing this when it first opened. The books (Twilight is a saga with the second novel, New Moon, being adapted for the screen at the moment) have over 17 million readers worldwide. Yup, I missed them too.
Robert Pattinson’s star is currently stratospheric, and climbing. He’s been parked at the number one spot in IMDB’s STARmeter which is based on internet searches, and is never far from the top spot in the Celebrity Heat Index. TWILIGHT cleaned up at this year’s MTV Movie Awards too, winning Best Movie. Pattinson won Best Breakthrough Male while his co-star, Kristen Stewart, won Best Female Performance, and together they won the all-important Best Kiss.
So back to 20th June and what our cinema in York is calling the “Rob-O-Rama”: TWILIGHT, HOW TO BE and LITTLE ASHES will screen back to back throughout the day. The response to announcing this event was so incredible in York, with some fans planning to travel staggering distances to be there, that we decided we better add four more cinemas to cover the length and breadth of the land.
ROBERT PATTINSON DAY is happening simultaneously in Aberdeen, Southampton, Liverpool, York and Clapham in London. Our Phone Room reports a large percentage of Clapham’s bookings from as far as Herfordshire, Essex, Kent, Surrey, Buckinghamshire and Middlesex.
Liverpool has people attending the event from Yorkshire, Sale and Chester while Aberdeen reports of people travelling from Glasgow and Airdrie. Pattinson fans from as far as Bristol, the Isle of Wight and Chichester are travelling to Southampton. But York outdoes them all with one fan traveling all the way from Austria.
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