Submerging your head in someone else’s turbid bathwater; open mouth-kissing your second cousin (‘s stale Reuben sandwich), or wearing a beige Snuggie® (commando) to a funeral.
Unpleasant, grossly inappropriate and deceptively uncomfortable, these are all experiences akin to watching the on-again–off-again on-and-off-screen romance between Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart bloom, wither and rise again over the past [number] years in a relationship that has today been revealed as Hollywood’s Highest Grossing Romance thanks to the powers of basic arithmetic, as well as the dormant sexuality and buying power of pre-pubescent demographics worldwide.
Using the combined domestic box-office revenue from the top-grossing romantic movies over the past three years, Forbes have calculated what will no doubt be etch-a-sketched into the annals of History as the definitive list of Hollywood’s Highest-Grossing Romantic Couples in 2012, The Year of Our Lord, Channing Tatum, and have come up with some disconcerting findings.
In news that is hopefully not at all shocking to you seeing as you’ve made it this far, Stewart and Pattinson’s on-screen dalliance in the moribund Twilight franchise was worth an unbelievable $1.7 billion USD in the last three years, with a net worth of $3.3 billion at the global box office. This, suffice to say, is a lot of money.
Regina George and The People’s Sexy Person, Channing Tatum, came a close second with the $125 million grossed from The Vow, a movie about romance and vows presumably (?), followed by the incredibly unrealistic partnering of Jennifer Aniston and human receding hair line, Adam Sandler, in Just Go With It, which was also a movie that happened, probably featuring kissing and acquiescence (?). It accumulated a staggering $103 million because idiots.
Nonagenarian power struggle, Carrie and Big, grossed a paltry $95 million, while my favourite rom-com leading lovers, Steve Carrell and Flawless Moore, pulled a crazy, stupid $84 million. This number, however, probably (certainly) had more to do with the sheer magnetism and dream partnering of dreamy gangster couple Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.
Adaptations of Nicholas Sparks novels, a credit in Mean Girls or a Disney franchise, and being Natalie Portman were also factors that contributed to the astounding pulling power of these otherwise innocuous offerings at the alter of the dying black arts that are Cinema and Romance.
You can read the full list here before joining the rest of The Internet here.
Photo: AFP/Stringer via Getty
