With A Little More Effort, Summit Entertainment Will Succeed In Destroying Twilight, Their Only Franchise

Posted by Michael Dance

Summit Entertainment has been showing its true colors as an embarrassingly amateur studio this week with a series of leaked reports about the backstage wrangling of the Twilight sequel, New Moon.

First, they announce on Twilight's opening weekend that New Moon will be in theaters in November 2009 -- one year after Twilight. That's preposterous. Most good sequels wait three years in between movies -- think Batman and Bourne -- but two is understandable for studios hungry for a hit (Iron Man 2 will arrive in 2010, while Quantum of Solace arrived two years after Casino Royale). But one? That only works if they planned it from the beginning, shot concurrently, and had the same team working on it (think Lord of the Rings). Of those, Summit is 0 for 3.

Then, they fire director Catherine Hardwicke and mount a pitifully transparent press release that pretended the departure was amicable. It was an especially cruel move because Hardwicke is still on the European press tour for Twilight -- meaning now instead of promoting the movie, she'll have to field nonstop public questions about the firing.

The latest news is that they're thinking about firing Taylor Lautner, who played Bella's Native American pal Jacob in Twilight. Jacob has a much bigger role in New Moon -- spoiler alert, he's actually a werewolf -- and Summit is getting cold feet about whether he's ready to take on such a big role or not.

Two major problems with this:

1. This never should have been leaked. Now the whole world gets to find out about how Lautner's agent is desperately trying to keep his client's gig by "reaching out to the imaging company behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in an attempt to demonstrate to Summit how a digitally bulked-up Lautner could work." (EW) Some publicity is bad, Summit.

2. They should have considered it before. It's just stupid. Didn't Summit know there was a strong possibility a sequel would be made, and the Jacob character would have a major role in it? Couldn't they weigh in when Jacob was being initially cast? Now Lautner's been accepted by Twilight fans and already appears in the first movie.

Whoever gets the new directing gig -- possibly Chris Weitz -- will now have to arrive in Vancouver four days from today to begin pre-production and make the final decision whether to ax Lautner or not. Then filming begins in March, then all the FX work has to be done by the November opening.

I guess my overall point, if you haven't quite figured it out, is that the folks at Summit are being grade-A idiots about their first and only hit franchise.

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[ READER COMMENTS ]

1

Michelle said:

I totally agree with everything you just said. Exchanging actors mid-series is just the stupidest thing I've ever heard of, especially when there's absolutely NO REASON for it. So the character has a growth spurt... so what! It's not pertinent to the storyline, or to his werewolf-y-ness, that he have this growth spurt. Isn't continuity far more important? They should have thought about all this before they hired him for Twilight. The second book had been out for years. It's not like they didn't know all this before.

And I'm glad they fired Hardwick. Her vision of the second book was too skewed. The story is ultimately about Edward and Bella, but she didn't seem to get that (according to a comment she made about Jacob Black - a side character!). So good riddance to her. Most of the fanbase feels this way.

Oh, and the new budget for New Moon is rumored to be 50 million! That's it! Twilight had a 37M budget and it looked cheap! Summit is going to screw this whole thing up.

Posted at 06:14 PM, on December 11 2008

2

jess said:

Replacing Taylor Lautner is like firing Robert Pattinson and replacing him with Zac Efron, it doesnt work, its makes you sick to even think about it, and makes you want to write extremly mean letters to summit entertainment.
they will lose money to this

Posted at 09:13 PM, on December 20 2008

3

boo ;] said:

another thing im not sure that summit has considered:
can some one please explain to me how they are going to film the next three films keeping the whole vampire cast the same age , as in the book it explains they do not age atall , and the charecters are ages around 17 and the actors playing them are in there twentys... how long are they gunna be able to keep that up? and i have heard it rumoured that eclipse and breaking dawn or new moon and eclipse will be filmed back to back and made into one film does anyone know if this is untrue? i think it says somthing about it on IMDB.com
i think twilight is amazing, robert pattinson has got to be the best suited acotr to this.

Posted at 10:12 AM, on January 15 2009

With A Little More Effort, Summit Entertainment Will Succeed In Destroying Twilight, Their Only Franchise

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