A Twilight TV show remake? Fans react to the insane news
The Twilight saga, the teen vampire romance films that became one of the world’s major talking points in the late Noughties, coming only second, perhaps, to the US election race and Obama’s accession, is going to be remade into a TV series.
The news has, predictably, caused a firestorm online, as fans of the film adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s novels cannot believe that anyone would bother touching what they deem to be a “cinematic masterpiece”.
According to Hollywood Reporter, the new Lionsgate Television series is in early development. Sinead Daly, who wrote the 2016 TV show Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, is attached to the script. It’s not yet clear which parts of the Twilight saga the new series will focus on, or what story the TV show is going to tell. Still in its very early days, the new series apparently has not yet even been bought by a network.
Meyer’s six Twilight saga novels were made into five films, all of which follow the story of vampire Edward Cullen and human Bella Swan who fell in love in the first novel. The series, which famously starred Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, has grossed over $3.4 billion worldwide.
So how have the Twilight fans, a notoriously passionate group, responded to the news?
“This is the worst day of my life,” tweeted one, while another said, “A twilight remake is blasphemous. you cannot catch lightning in a bottle twice.”
Here is our pick of some of the most heartfelt reactions online.
What a difference a year makes. With the first Twilight film a huge phenomenon on DVD, and the Meyer books belatedly reaching a wide UK readership, Edward Cullen and Bella Swan have ascended to iconic characters here, and Britain has succumbed to R-Pattz mania. Now sequel New Moon has debuted in the UK with £11.68m, which is a whopping 4.6 times the opening weekend of the original film. In three days, New Moon has already taken more money at British cinemas than Twilight did in its lifetime.
New Moon’s impressive number is the second-biggest debut of 2009, just behind the £11.93m Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince earned over the Friday-to-Sunday portion of its five-day opening in July. It’s also ahead of the opening weekend grosses of other blockbusters over the past three years such as The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Simpsons Movie, Shrek the Third and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – as long as previews are ignored and you compare takings over Friday-to-Sunday. New Moon just failed to match the opening weekend of 2007’s Spider-Man 3 (£11.83m), and is significantly behind the debuts of last October’s Quantum of Solace and 2007’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Twilight is not the first film franchise boasting a second entry that significantly out-performed its predecessor. The Matrix Reloaded debuted with takings 3.6 times the opening weekend of the original Matrix, and The Dark Knight’s opening was 2.5 times that of Batman Begins.
The New Moon success powered British cinemas to their best weekend of the year, with the top 15 films grossing a collective £20.86m. (The official chart compilers record the 17-19 July as the year’s best, but that figure is artificially swollen by £7.85m in Harry Potter previews.)
