Twilight's Narrow Escape: Original Movie Plan Risked Burying the Franchise Alive
There's something very urgent that you need to know about the Twilight movies.
The rights to Stephanie Meyers' work was originally bought by Paramount. A screenplay was written. And in that screenplay, Bella Swan is a teenaged vampire hunter who works for the FBI.
Oh, what's that? You need to know more? Great, because I want to talk about it more. Possibly I want to talk about it forever.
There are many demented lunatics in the world. Some of them are the type of people who write books about werewolves falling in love with a newborn baby. And some of them are the type of people who look at those books and think, what if this story had more jet skis?
Apparently, one such lunatic worked at Paramount between 2004 and 2007, when that studio carried the rights to the Twilight series.
I guess you could be forgiven if, as a young screenwriter, you thought Twilight didn't have enough plot to fill a runtime and captivate an audience. After all, it's a book whose story breakdown looks like this:
65% of teens staring at each other
25% light stalking
8% talking about how someone smells
2% scary vampire hijinks
It might make sense to think that the screenplay should involve a much higher percentage of scary vampire hijinks – until the Twilight phenomenon, vampires were associated with bloodlust and horror.
So the Paramount team changed the story.
In their version, Bella Swan is a vampire hunter (and a track star, because why not) in high school. She's out for vengeance because a vampire killed her father.
Naturally, she works for the FBI, because federal spy agencies often employ kids not old enough to drink. At one point in the story, Bella and the FBI chase after some evil vampires… on jet skis. JET SKIS!
Naturally, this sounds like a movie that I want to see immediately, but there's no doubt it would have alienated Twilight's enormous fanbase and buried the franchise alive.
Why buy the rights to a tender-hearted teen romance and turn it into Budget Buffy?
It's always so strange when studios shell out millions of dollars to purchase the rights to a book, only to turn around and make a movie that bears absolutely no resemblance to said book.
Paramount gave up on their version of Twilight and sold the rights to Summit Entertainment in 2007, apparently due to creative differences with Stephanie Meyer.
One can only imagine that Meyer demanded the movies look more like the books, and Paramount execs thought "a movie with 65% teens staring at each other and 25% light stalking?! It will never sell!"
They must have felt awfully foolish when the Twilight series, largely very faithful to Meyer's books, went on to gross 3.4 billion dollars worldwide.