More action, More Vampires & less lads with their tops off….
Twilight producer Mark Morgan has given fans an insight to troubles the franchise faced in its early development phase. It looks like Paramount Pictures didn’t want the teen romance angle and wanted to go for full on action film.
In an interview today, Morgan said that Paramount was originally interested in making the film but revealed “It was a blessing that Summit [made the move], because frankly, Paramount would have chosen a different director. Their rewrite wasn’t exactly like the book. I love Paramount, but I do not think they would have hired Catherine Hardwicke, our first director. They would have gone for someone bigger. Boys. More action. I mean, one of their drafts literally had a Korean FBI agent who was hunting and tracking vampires across the coast. There was SWAT in the trees and literally it was like, ‘Red leader, read leader one′, and the vampires were picking them out of the woods. It would have been a different movie.”
Other changes he mentioned include “Bella fighting back. They had her father dying in one of the scripts, actually, and her becoming a vampire in the first movie. There were a lot of weird things that I don’t think they understood at the time, because the books were just becoming popular. By the time [the script] got to Summit, they were smart enough to say ‘You know what? Let’s throw out all the old scripts and let’s start from scratch.”
To be honest, we quite like the sound of Paramounts unmade version, but would it be the big hit it is today if Taylor Lautner hadn’t gotten his top off and won over a generation of pre-teen girls?