Twilight Casting Underway

Summit Entertainment has begun casting for a film based on “Twilight,” a best-selling young adult novel by Stephanie Meyer about a girl, Bella Swan, who moves to a small town and falls for Edward Cullen, a vampire.  Things are further complicated when Edward’s nemesis and a coven of more unscrupulous vampires come to town.  Kristen Stewart (”Zathura”) has officially been cast as Bella, Catherine Hardwike (”Thirteen”) is directing, and Melissa Rosenberg (”Dexter”) has penned the screenplay.  The studio hopes to turn the film into the first part of a franchise, as the original series consists of 3 novels. 

This sounds a lot like that whole Buffy/Angel love debacle that Joss Whedon managed to drag out for 3 seasons (and I loved every minute of it) but without the whole Slayer angle.  I could actually see this movie being successful, though.  People love vampires, and as long as audiences are open-minded enough to accept vampires that don’t burn in the sun, there’s enough babysitting money going around to turn this into a franchise.  Come to think of it, this may be the first time in film (with the exception of the vampires in Blade using sunblock) where vampires aren’t killed by sunlight.  There’s tons of books and comics (”Blood and Water” being my favorite) about vampires who don’t have the sun sensitivity.  In “Twilight,” the vampires just avoid the sun because it makes their skin sparkle.