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Hollywood Wants To Make 'Twilight' a Thing Again

By Allyson Johnson | TV | April 19, 2023 |

By Allyson Johnson | TV | April 19, 2023 |


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For those who worried the internet wasn’t toxic enough, fear not. As we wage battle with J.K. Rowling and her trolls, another studio is getting ready to relaunch a series left better off dead. It’s being reported that Lionsgate Television is in the early stages of possibly developing a Twilight TV series.

Author Stephenie Meyer is expected to take part in the making of the series with Sinead Daly (The Get Down, Tell Me Lies) attached to write. The news has been released early enough that we still don’t know which angle the series will be taking or even what network it will air on, as the creative team decides on whether or not to re-adapt the existing story or spinoff from the main narrative to tell parallel tales set in the same world.

The issue isn’t with Twilight (readying my defense of the Catherine Hardwicke original) but in that it’s yet another example piled on another example of Hollywood’s inability to look beyond what has worked before to create something fresh and exciting. There has been no shortage of science-fiction and fantasy or YA books in recent years that offer more diverse and interesting storytelling, but the built-in fandom of Twilight prevails.

That fandom carries with it longevity, too, as there are still folks who believe, wholeheartedly, that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are secretly married with a team of kids. Despite the books being long finished and the movies lessening in quality over time, the fanbase has remained loyal. The series may be setting itself up to fail if it chooses to merely recast the roles and reimagine the books as television episodes. The fan casting that led up to the original movies was pervasive. People are as vocal (if not more so) now as they were in the early aughts.

The news is disheartening not because we don’t expect Hollywood to misunderstand what audiences are looking for but because it’s lazy. With all that money at their disposal, it would be nice to see more of it put into stories that aren’t already attached to existing IPs. Instead, let’s hold our breath and hope that we don’t hear about television remakes of The Divergent series, Ender’s Game, or The Maze Runner next.

Not for nothing, but if you are going to watch a television adaptation of a popular book centered on vampires that has already been made into a movie, go watch last year’s Interview with a Vampire instead.

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