The Twilight saga was massively successful, but the careers of its stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson prove that it's too late to mount another Twilight movie. Adapted from the novels of the same name by author Stephenie Meyer, the Twilight saga was the tale of a small-town girl, Bella Swan, and her immortal vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen. Over-the-top, earnest, and painfully easy to parody, the Twilight books soon became a series of movies that retained the self-serious tone of the source material.
Fortunately for their creators, the Twilight movies also held on to the franchise’s fanbase and were a huge financial success. Despite earning mixed - at best - reviews from critics, the Twilight movies were massively successful and launched their lead actors to superstardom in the years that followed. However, while Twilight may have been a major success that kickstarted the careers of its leads, all good things come to an end.
Franchises with young fans, in particular, can be sure their viewers will age out of caring about Edward, Bella, and company and sure enough, soon after Twilight inspired countless teen movie ripoffs, the series ended just as its popularity was beginning to wane. By the release of the final movie, Breaking Dawn Part 2, many had moved on to the darker Hunger Games franchise. However, in recent years, ‘00s nostalgia has led many fans to revisit Twilight and delight in its corny but charming story. Despite this fact, it is too late for a Twilight sequel as the cast has gotten too busy, the franchise’s moment in the zeitgeist has since passed and the saga’s best directors have moved on to bigger things.
According to the happy ending of the Twilight movies and their novel counterparts, Bella and Edward are immortal, ageless vampires, which would make bringing back the visibly older Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson a problem. Meyers worked around this by retelling the original Twilight via Edward’s perspective in Midnight Sun and flipping the genders of the original novel in Life & Death. However, neither of these follow-ups are Twilight sequels in the traditional sense, and a movie adaptation of either would demand Stewart and Pattison play their seventeen-year-old selves again. The prospect of the duo attempting to hide the last decade of aging in a new Twilight is somewhat laughable, and one that proves that it's too late for a direct Twilight sequel to move ahead now.
Throughout their careers, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have both spent the intervening decade as action stars or indie darlings at different points. Pattinson’s turn as Batman promises to launch a new franchise for the actor while Stewart’s critically acclaimed Princess Diana biopic Spencer has seen her earn critical acclaim. In both cases, these impressive credits prove that both of the Twilight franchise’s biggest stars are simply too busy to return to their respective Twilight roles, and things will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future. As proven by Stewart’s starring role in Charlie’s Angels and Pattinson’s scene-stealing work in The Devil All the Time, both actors are keeping the mainstream and independent facets of their careers open, leaving little opportunity for a nostalgic return to Twilight’s small-town setting of Forks.
While Twilight has undergone something of a revival in recent years, the fond memories viewers have for the series can’t compare to its initial impact. At its height, Twilight was a pop-cultural juggernaut, and a uniquely ‘00s one whose unexpected impact can’t be replicated or reproduced. The question of whether one was Team Edward or Team Jacob was a quintessentially 2010 one, and the love triangles of even successful franchises such as The Hunger Games or Divergent were unable to garner Twilight’s level of mainstream fame at their respective heights of popularity. However, the more outsized the success of the series, the harder it is to recreate. No amount of Twilight fandom memes like “Bella, where have you been loca?” can hope to recreate the franchise’s original hype, which was simply too large to last long (much like the meteoric rise and almost immediate fall of fellow late ‘00s hit Glee).
Twilight’s original director Catherine Hardwicke was last seen working on 2019’s critically lambasted Miss Bala and has otherwise not returned to big-budget filmmaking since Red Riding Hood (released a year after Twilight and over a decade ago now). Having cut her teeth on smaller-scale movies such as Thirteen, Hardwicke has mostly returned to that territory in the years since with the 2015 tear-jerker Miss You Already. Director David Slade, meanwhile, who injected some welcome edge and humor into the Twilight series standout Eclipse, has yet to return to movies, focusing on directing episodes for shows like American Gods, Hannibal and Breaking Bad instead. Despite Slade having a promising career pre-Twilight, beginning with the edgy indie thriller Hard Candy and progressing to the gory, R-rated vampire horror 30 Days of Night, the director never revisited big-budget blockbusters after Eclipse. As such, it is unlikely Slade would be interested in helming another Twilight franchise outing at this stage in his career.
While Breaking Dawn’s reliable blockbuster helmer Bill Condon has stayed working since the series ended, his contributions were mostly seen as perfunctory additions to the franchise. Meanwhile, director Chris Weitz, who helmed the second movie in the series, has never returned to directing big-budget releases. It may have been New Moon’s terrible critical performance that led Weitz to retreat into screenwriting and producing, but the helmer has fared far better in that arena, where he has helped script some huge hits in the past decade like Rogue One. As such, with neither the best nor lesser directors of the franchise available, the lead stars aging out of their roles, and the cultural moment of the series well and truly over, it is an unfortunate but unavoidable reality that it's too late now for another Twilight movie.
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