Guess what, Hollywood: Women like movies, too. 2008 has been a good year for proving that women can be a powerful force when it comes to box office dollars. The Sex and the City Movie was a huge deal to fans of the HBO show and many other female moviegoers who appreciated a female-driven movie they could go out to see with girlfriends. It seems like there's a new action/superhero flick every week or so with a male protagonist and some peripheral women in girlfriend/wife/damsel in distress roles. With Sex and the City, we got four female protagonists — and ones who are approaching middle age, no less. The ladies, they came out in droves to see this movie, resulting in record-breaking box office sales for R-rated comedies, romantic comedies and for movies carried by women.

For more on that other movie with a huge female fan base, read more.

Twilight opened to the roar of loyal fans of Stephenie Meyer's book series, a fan base consisting almost entirely of young women. The movie's box office take its first weekend was the highest ever for a female director, and its $70 million even surpassed SATC's opening weekend gross of $57 million. Fanboys have always been little gold mines when it comes to ticket sales, but Twilight's success soundly proved that fangirls are just as powerful.

In 2007, Warner Bros. executive Jeff Robinov allegedly said he wanted to avoid movies with female leads altogether because they hadn't been paying off at the box office (Jodi Foster's The Brave One and Nicole Kidman's The Invasion were used as examples of lady-driven flops). So while SATC and Twilight weren't totally among my favorite movies of the year, I've enjoyed seeing Robinov proven wrong.

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