Turns out, no one wanted to turn ‘Twilight’ into a movie at first
When a movie goes into production, sometimes it’s a long and difficult road to actually get it made. And then sometimes it’s literally a road no one wants to take to begin with. In the case of the Twilight saga, it surprisingly the latter. Crazy, right? Once upon a time, no one wanted to bring Bella and Edward to the big screen.
Twilight‘s OG director, Catherine Hardwicke recently spoke to BuzzFeed News about making the first film in the franchise, and dropped some pretty crazy Twilight truths. Like, the fact that people believed a movie about vampires wouldn’t perform well at the box office, and “no one thought it could make any money.” Wanna know how much money Twilight made on it’s opening day alone? $35 million dollars.
“When I went to my first meeting [at Paramount], I said, ‘This [script] is going in the trash.’ I could never make a good movie out of this. We’re going to rewrite it more similar to the book.” Working with screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, she and Hardwicke worked through a brand new script where they tried to capture the feeling of “crazy dizzy stupid love.”
Clearly, it worked and everything clicked. All together, that first Twilight movie grossed over $400 million worldwide, and that’s still not counting the subsequent movies, DVD sales, and merchandise. Was it a risky gamble back in 2008? Yes, but clearly it’s paid off in the long run.
(Image via Summit Entertainment)
