Robert Pattinson: this generation's Leonardo DiCaprio?

Robert Pattinson on the red carpet for "New Moon" L.A. premiere, on 16th November 2009.
"Not since Leo, circa Titanic, has a young actor been so aggressively beloved by 13-year-old girls worldwide", writes Evgenia Peretz in her Vanity Fair profile of Robert Pattinson (Twilight's Hot Gleaming, December 2009). Peretz is right—and I would know. I was one of those teenage girls who got caught up in the "Leo-mania" fan frenzy in the late 90s. The first copy of Vanity Fair I ever bought was the January 1998 issue with Leo on the cover. I hung Tiger Beat and Teen Bop posters of Leo on my bedroom walls. And after I saw Titanic in the movie theater six times, one of my friends and I even created a Leo Web site, at a time when you could only access the Internet via a dial-up modem.Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of "Inception".Robert Pattinson on the set of "Remember me".

But among us teenagers, it was only DiCaprio who orbited in the true superstar stratosphere". Source: www.vanityfair.com
Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in "Romeo and Juliet" (1996).

"If Twilight was a fantasy twist on Romeo and Juliet, then New Moon is the story of Romeo, Juliet, and the boy who comes between them, Ned". Source: www.newsinfilm.com