According to conventional wisdom for the last few years, the fanboy maketh the blockbuster.

It's a rule Hollywood has lived by for the last 10 years or so. If you want a movie to make it big, then the demographic to aim for is male and aged around 13-24. Certainly the studios have had great success in their pursuit of the fanboy during the last decade by mining comic-books for superheroes and putting them in high-octane action movies.

'Twilight' stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in front of baying fangirls at the U.S. premiere.

Throughout the noughties, high-profile, CGI-heavy movies like “X-Men” (2000) and “Spider-Man” (2002) and lavish adaptations like the “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy have been huge successes, driven by money from the pockets of mainly male cinema-goers.

As recently as 2007, the media was continuing to report that the nerdy teen and twentysomething were Hollywood's core audience for blockbusters. But it seems this once reliable demographic may now be under attack - and from an unlikely source.

In its opening weekend in the U.S., director Catherine Hardwicke’s vampire romance, "Twilight," took $70.6 million at the box-office, knocking Bond movie "Quantum of Solace" off the number one slot. By its second weekend it had easily passed the $100 million mark. And interestingly, the film’s success is being driven by young female audiences.

Exit polls carried out by the independent distributor behind “Twilight,” Summit Entertainment, found that 75 percent of the movie’s audience is female - and half were under 25.

Of course, "Twilight," which is adapted from Stephenie Meyer's cult "Twilight" series of books (which has sold more than 17 million copies), has benefited from having a ready-made, salivating teenage fanbase.

Nevertheless, "Twilight" is the strongest example yet of the new box-office might shown by the teen and "tween" (11- and 12-year-old) fangirl demographic this year.

Other films that that have got Hollywood execs sitting up and taking notice include "Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour," and "High School Musical 3: Senior Year," which broke the U.S. record for the highest-scoring musical opening. It made $42 million in the first weekend, from a three-quarters female audience - and more than half were under-18.

"Teen girls rule the earth," Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers, told Variety. "If you look back at the 'Hannah Montana' movie, how well that did, and now this movie ['Twilight'], the teen girl audience will never be ignored again or underestimated.”

Perhaps less dramatically, women in general appear to be gaining box-office bite. In the UK, female-friendly ABBA-themed musical "Mamma Mia!" has eclipsed "The Dark Knight" by around $40 million to make it the number one film at the UK box office so far this year - as well as becoming the UK’s fastest-selling DVD.

Despite big-hitters like this year's "The Dark Knight," long term Hollywood is eventually going to run out of high-profile superheroes. And recent developments might mean they will have to start chasing the female demographic, in the hope of further enlivening an audience group that has been called a "sleeping giant."

What do you think? Does the thought of a slew of movies aimed at teenage girls make your blood run cold? Or are you pleased that Hollywood is finally recognizing other often-ignored demographics?

You don't need to be a brain surgeon to make TV, but sometimes it can be pretty complicated.

Rainy weather on the Australia's 'sunny' Gold Coast covers the camera lenses with raindrops forcing the chopper to land.

Take our shoot for the November show. We were on the "The Gold Coast" in Australia for one of the southern hemisphere's big film events, the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. The Gold Coast is normally blessed by blue skies and bluer seas, but this time it was grey, wet and windy. To show off the classic "Gold Coast look," we had hired a helicopter with special "cineflex" cameras - that can shoot a stable image no matter how much turbulence the chopper encounters - to shoot the coastline from above.

The plan for the opening and closing sequences of the show was to fly the chopper in from the sea towards shore, running fast over the water Miami Vice-style, then pan up to reveal our presenter, Myleene Klass, perched on the deck of a boat saying "Welcome to the show."

Sounds simple, right? But each day we would prepare for this "money shot" and the weather would dash our hopes. No matter how much expensive technology you have, if the weather isn't with you then there's nothing you can do. The final day of the shoot dawned, we still hadn't got our shot, and Myleene, was due on a plane at 10am. Time was running out.

The boat's skipper relays instructions from the show producer in the chopper above the Myleene on the boat deck.

Logistical issues, like how to communicate, were also making things more complicated. The chopper is too noisy for a mobile phone so I had to cue Myleene to deliver her lines using a combination of hand signals and radioing between the chopper pilot and the skipper of the boat who would then instruct Myleene, inevitably causing a delay.

This meant the first attempt at the shot was a failure. Shortly after, it started raining again. The pilot's satellite indicated there would be rain for 10 minutes followed by a seven minute window of sunshine, followed by a long-lasting downpour. This shot had to work.

Success: both shots bagged just as the rain began to come down again.

We wiped the rainwater off the lenses and took off amid the gathering rain clouds. I timed my cues a bit later and we got the opening link and the closing link in the bag just as it started to rain once more.

Television: it's not brain surgery but sometimes it makes you feel like you're in need of some.

Watch the successful shots on this month's Screening Room which goes behind the scenes at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, shows footage of the CNN APSA Viewer Choice Award for the Best Asia-Pacific film of all time and features an in-depth interview with Oliver Stone.

LONDON, England - So I'm sat in Screen 3 of The Curzon Soho, an artsy basement cinema in London's Soho district. We're 10 minutes into the early afternoon screening of black-and-white documentary "Of Time And The City," Terence Davies' elegiac paean to post-World War Two Liverpool. Selected to play at the Cannes Film Festival, Davies' very personal outsider memoir has been universally praised by critics, its release much anticipated by UK audiences for its use of –

Terence Davies' 'Of Time And The City' - best appreciated without annoying audience members.

And then it starts.

Creak creak. Creak creak. Creak creak.

My seat pitches back and forth. Back and forth.

I look round. A fellow audience member in the row behind has his knees buried into the back of the seat next to mine.

I stare. He stares back. He does not care.

Creak creak. Creak creak. Creak creak.

No one else is sat nearby. I'm the only person bothered. If I complain I risk disturbing the pic for everyone else. I don't want to move. Why should I?

So I simmer in silence for the next hour - and fling "Of Time And The City" into that grubby popcorn bucket marked Movie Screenings Wrecked by Someone Else In The Audience.

Poke around among the dregs of said bucket and you'll stumble on the likes of "Batman" (1989, Cardiff), when I sat next to a scarily pale woman and her scarier paler teen son. Ten minutes in and they yanked bulging carrier bags from under their seats. For the next hour they fell upon samosas, sausage rolls, crisps, orange juice cartons, meat pies, pizza slices and chicken wings like those teeny tiny dinosaurs munching on the asking-for-it IT guy in "Jurassic Park."

Then there was "Last Orders" (2001), Fred Schepisi's touching drama about loss starring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone (sounds a tall order but Schepisi managed it). Did the audience really benefit from having a party of students among its numbers that night, only one of who could speak English - and who had to loudly translate the dialogue for the other 11?

It's not just been in the UK - take "Spider-Man 2" (2004) in a moviehouse just off Times Square. The best that New York could offer included scary-looking gang members nonchalantly sloping up and down the aisles; the background drone from two fellow tourists who mistakenly thought they had tickets for "Fiddler On The Roof"; possibly a séance going on near the emergency exit. Hey, at least the seats were comfy.

Being stuck on the subway in high summer, being handed a parking ticket first thing on a Monday – nothing, but nothing, hurts more than having a movie screening wrecked.

They're all there, sloshing around in the bucket.

"Bladerunner: The Director's Cut" (1992, constant, maybe understandable, drunken guffaws at Sean Young's performance); "The Truman Show" (1998, "dee-diddly-dee-dee-dee-diddly-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee" from a cellphone at the crucial bit when Truman's yacht crunches the horizon); "The Others" (2001, how is it physically possible for popcorn to scratch so loudly?); "Solaris" (2003, bored father with weekend custody of sugar-pumped toddlers in ponderous sci-fi drama); "Sideways" (2004, man swaying back and forth for the first half of the film, then left to right for the second half – altitude sickness maybe?); something directed by Pedro Almodovar (sometime during the last 40 years, too massively irritated by the end to recall what the movie was or where i saw it or what wound me up in the first place - just that it somehow involved cheesy nachos).

Seems I'm not the only one. A few weeks back cinema chain Vue made some of its "Quantum Of Solace" screenings adult-only in the UK in order to stop kids ruining the movie for older patrons. It's a move made from the best of intentions – but as my litany of movie misery attests, over-18s are as much to blame as children. It all comes down to a question of respect, regardless of age.

Several years ago, I thought about printing up some flyers to hand out at the end of wrecked screenings. "Thank you for ruining my enjoyment of the film" they would read at the top. "You managed to do so by..." There would then follow a checklist of common complaints with the appropriate offenses ticked.

My other half thankfully caught sight of an early draft. She pointed out that (i) it was arrogantly patronizing to grade people on their movie-watching manners; (ii) she would never go to the movies with me again (though that would avoid the usual rom-com versus zombie flick bickering); (iii) she would refuse to visit me in hospital if I was dumb enough to go ahead with the idea.

She also reminded me that I was, um, being utterly hypocritical. So...

...I'd like to apologize to anyone disturbed by a group of giggling drunken students at a late-night screening of Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon" in the northern English city of Sheffield in 1992. I'm really, really sorry. It's just that the last 30 minutes seemed like some hybrid mutation of "The Poseidon Adventure" and "What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?," with Hugh Grant slung into the sad sorry cocktail for good measure. What can I say? Drink seemed the obvious, if inexcusable, solution.

But what do you think? Should cinemagoers be more tolerant of each other's foibles? Have you any ideas for trouble-free cinema viewing? Send your comments to the usual below...

LONDON, England - Turning a great novel into a film should be a no brainer.  So, why are there so many disappointing movie adaptations of good novels?

Brazilian Fernando Meirelles' 'Blindness' is an ambitious adaptation of a classic novel that doesn't quite work.

"City of God" director Fernando Meirelles' new film "Blindness" is the latest example: an ambitious adaptation of a classic novel that has fallen short of the mark.

On paper there is a lot to anticipate: it is a silver screen version of Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago's celebrated novel "Ensaio sobra a cegueira," directed by hot Brazilian director, Meirelles and starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael Garcia Bernal starring.

And yet, the film, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, was not well-received by critics. It is certainly affecting and beautifully shot, but despite profund themes the plot is muddling and lacks coherent direction, which is where it falls down.

Perhaps it is because the film tries too hard to do justice to its rich source material, and while a reader may readily accept a wide range of complex messages and themes delivered in written prose, films require more cohesion.

There is also specter of the "unfilmable novel," those works considered impossible to translate for the big screen for whatever reason: overtly sexual content, nebulous plot or complex structure among others.

It is a notion that has been strengthened by questionable adaptations of classic works by accomplished filmmakers: David Cronenberg's attempt at J.G. Ballard's highly erotic "Crash" which managed to convey the sex but was dull and Michael Winterbottom turning "Tristram Shandy" into the highly forgettable "A Cock and Bull Story" to name two.

Are simple storylines just easier to translate? Francis Ford Coppola managed to create an award-winning work of art from Mario Puzo's pulp crime novel, "The Godfather."

Streamlining novels with complex narratives can also work well. Last year's three big awards season movies, the Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men," Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will be Blood," and Joe Wright's "Atonement," are all based on rich and intricate novels.

But, in "No Country for Old Men" very little is made of Llewelyn Moss or Ed Tom Bell's military past, which is a big part of the book; and much of Robbie Turner's torrid and soul-searching journey through France to Dunkirk in Ian McEwan's "Atonement" is omitted from the film version.

But just cutting out the hard bits can't be the whole story. Mary Harron's successful adaptation of another "unfilmable book," "American Psycho" succeeded because she injected humour into Brett Easton Ellis' cold vision of an 80's murderer and transformed it into a satire of the yuppie lifestyle of the time.

As the cinema world waits for the upcoming film adaptations of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood" let's hope that these challenging books will unleash the director's creativity.

What do you think? Can a great novel become a great film? What are the best adaptations of novels? And, do you think there are some novels that are unfilmable?

LONDON, England – Before Ridley Scott and conceptual artist H. R. Geiger invented the titular space demon of horror classic "Alien," Hollywood's concept of creatures from beyond the stars pretty much amounted to little green men or bug-eyed beasties.

When Alien and Predator did finally meet, it proved something of a disappointment for fanboys.

But the xenomorph with acid for saliva and a somewhat disturbing impregnation program spawned (pardon the pun) three more films of variable quality, a steady stream of merchandise and the godlike worship of Scott by fanboys worldwide.

Pitching Alien against Predator, another much-lauded monster icon of recent times, had also been the dream faceoff for many a geek during much of the past two decades.

But when it eventually happened, the results - 2004's "AVP: Alien vs. Predator" and last year's follow-up "AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem" - disappopinted critics and audiences alike.

And Scott, like any parent, also has some misgivings about the career path subsequently taken by his ghastly offspring.

"It's a pity [20th Century Fox] they did that, for sure," Scott told CNN while promoting his latest movie, "Body of Lies" which stars Leonardo diCaprio and Russell Crowe, "because I think it had a pretty good start. But you know, that's revenue. They have to find that revenue."

Scott actually thinks that the problems began for his fang-faced, drooling progeny sometime between "Alien," released in 1979,and "Aliens," its 1986 followup, which was directed by James Cameron.

"It's a great creature, and I think the thing they didn't do is that they should have changed it," he explains.

"The should have started changing it after number one."

And that, according to Scott, is why none of the other Alien films are as terrifying as the first.

"There's nothing like that original dynamic, which scares the living daylights out of me," he says.

Do you think that "Alien" was the most terrifying of the four films? What about "Aliens?" Did you think "AVP: Alien vs. Predator" was any good? Let us know what you think.

LONDON, England – Jeremiah Zagar's film, "In A Dream," recently held it's international premiere at prestigious UK documentary festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest.

"In A Dream," which took more than seven years to make is ostensibly about Zagar's father, Isaiah, a well-known mosaic artist and storyteller, but ultimately becomes a love story centred on his parents' relationship as it teeters, after 40 years, on the verge of collapse.

The film has picked up awards at SXSW Film Festival, as well as at San Francisco and Philadelphia film festivals among others.

LONDON, England – There are some films, no matter how good, that should be a little bit shorter.

The movie 'Che,' with Benicio Del Toro, left, and directed by Steven Soderbergh, right, lasts four hours-plus.

I went to see "Julia" by Erick Zonca last night. The lights went down at 6.30pm and I came up for air around 9pm thinking: "Phew, that was long."

It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the film. It's hard not to be impressed by Tilda Swinton's performance as washed-up party girl who kidnaps a young boy. It was nominated for a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, so I'm not alone in seeing the film's merits.

It's not even that long compared to something like "Che," Soderbergh's bladder-challenging four hours-plus two-part biopic of guerilla leader Che Guevara. It's just that for some reason, despite being quite riveted by what was happening on the screen, I got the fidgets.

Was it just a bit slow and a case for more ruthlessness in the cutting room? Or is there, in fact, an ideal movie length - like the three minutes bandied about as perfect for a pop song?

Some people maintain that a film should run for around 90 minutes. A quick scan of what's on in the cinemas right now bears this out: "Quantum of Solace" - 106 minutes, "Burn After Reading" - 95 minutes, "Saw V" - 92 minutes.

But you also can't ignore the genre: more than two hours for a comedy might be pushing it and an epic that clocks in at 90 minutes will cheat the audience.

Interestingly, the top five films on imdb.com's top 250 films, as voted for by users, are all over two hours long.

What do you think? Will a "good" film will keep you riveted no matter how long it is? Does it depend on genre? Or should some filmmakers stop being so indulgent and keep the length manageable?