Kristen Stewart Is Willing to Revisit Her Famous Franchise as a Director
The Twilight movies are nothing short of a cultural institution. Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole” will always be associated with its baseball scene. The dead of fall and winter will forever be known as “hoa hoa season.” “Where have you been, loca?” has entered way too many people’s vocabulary.
In many ways, that original series of movies can’t be improved on. But in the age of endless legacy sequels and reboots and remakes, the possibility of it is still on people’s minds. The closest we might get is an animated adaptation of the series’ companion novel Midnight Sun, which has been in the works at Netflix since 2024. But Kristen Stewart, who famously played Bella Swan in the original movies, is suggesting another possibility.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Stewart revealed that she would be willing to add new things to the tapestry of Twilight… but maybe as a director. She most recently made her feature directorial debut with The Chronology of Water.
“It’s funny, I was talking to one of my friends about Twilight because it airs a lot on TV at the end of the year,” Stewart revealed. “I asked how the movie was aging because he watches it every Christmas with his family. Look, I love what Catherine [Hardwicke] and Chris [Weitz] did, I love what all the directors did, but the films were so full of personality, strange, and so characteristic of that time. They didn’t even know what it was before it became a hit. Imagine what we could do with a big budget, plenty of love, and support. I don’t know, I’d love to readapt it. Yes, of course, I’ll do the remake. I’m committed.”
What Would a Twilight Remake Even Be?
Let’s be honest… the Twilight audience would watch Stewart’s involvement with any part of the franchise again, and there’s no doubt that she has a long directing career in front of her. But she does have a good point in terms of Hardwicke and Weitz’s directing, and how they happened to tap into something distinct in teen culture in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It’s not impossible to make that magic again, especially with the “big budget, plenty of love, and support” that Stewart mentions… but any remake would need to justify its existence regardless.
That might be why an animated adaptation of Midnight Sun, the 2020 book that chronicles the events of the first book from Edward Cullen’s point of view, is the closest we’re going to get for the time being. It presents an angle that fans haven’t seen onscreen yet, instead of just retreading the same sequence of events in a different medium or a slightly-updated production value and aesthetic.
The Midnight Sun series is being executive produced and written by Sinead Daly, whose work includes Tell Me Lies, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Raised by Wolves, and The Get Down. Franchise author Stephanie Meyer is among the executive producers, alongside Meghan Hibbert, Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, Erik Feig, and Samie Kim Falvey.
(featured image: Summit Entertainment)
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