The Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer were a global sensation, but the upcoming Twilight TV show shouldn’t follow all parts of the books to the letter. The four paranormal romance novels written by Meyer and released between 2005 and 2020 riffed off emerging authors in fantasy such as Anne Rice. Rice’s Vampire Chronicles popularized the vampire as protagonist. Meyer’s books explore the paranormal features of romance between its main character Bella, the vampire Edward, and the werewolf Jacob, but not all of these are suitable for TV.
The Twilight Saga movies that came out between 2008 and 2016 adapted Meyer’s books, making Twilight even bigger. The movies were reasonably faithful to the books, taking up five movies to tell their story. While they didn’t adapt every single part of the books, they did include some of their less tasteful aspects. In April 2023, Lionsgate announced that it would be creating a TV show reboot of the story and in March 2024, this was revealed to be animated. The exciting addition to the franchise has the chance to fix several problems with the books and movies, including one particular aspect of Edward’s character.The animated Twilight TV show must fix the books’ and movies’ Edward Cullen problem to be successful – specifically, that Cullen acts problematically toward Bella, normalizing toxic and stalkerish behavior. The animated show will sidestep the difficulties of creating CGI and practical effects in supernatural moments, but it will also offer the franchise a clean slate. The smart choice to avoid live-action will make the show so different from the movies that it could use Twilight characters to tell a rather different story. This would reinvigorate a franchise that brought an important genre to a far wider audience.The show must, of course, be true to the central tenets of the plot, maintaining what was fun about it. But as AMC+’s Interview with the Vampire proves, an updated vision of a much-loved book series can actually be the best thing to happen to it. In the books, Edward became infatuated with Bella as he could read the thoughts of others, but not Bella’s. After considering killing her, trying to resist her, and failing, Edward broke into Bella’s house and watched her sleep. Bella overlooked this and fell in love with him, trivializing the dangers of real-life stalking. The show could remedy this issue.
