It’s a bittersweet year for Warner Bros. as this summer will see the end of the Harry Potter franchise. There are simply no more books to make movies out of. Come next fall and Summit Entertainment will be facing a similar issue with their incredibly successful Twilight franchise as The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 hits theaters to end the series.
The only difference between the situations these two film franchises are facing is that there actually is another Twilight book, albeit an unfinished one. That’s not stopping Summit from bringing back Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) and the rest of the cast for more films, based off of Stephanie Meyers’ Midnight Sun.
Summit Entertainment announced today, April 1st, that they’ve finalized negotiations for the principal cast, who will return for a hefty $20 million each for two more Twilight movies. David Slade (Eclipse), who’s recently had his name associated with Twentieth Century Fox’s Daredevil reboot, will return to direct both. Melissa Rosenberg has written all of the series screenplays to date and will return to pen Midnight Sun. Like Breaking Dawn, Midnight Sun will be split into two parts and they will be shot together.
For those unfamiliar with the story behind Midnight Sun, it was meant to be a retelling of Twilight with a neat twist of it being from the perspective of Edward Cullen as opposed to Bella Swan. Unfortunately for fans and for Meyer, the 12-chapter draft was leaked online and this demotivated the author from continuing. The 12 chapters were later released to fans for free and Meyer said she would one day return to finish it after not hearing about it for two years. Perhaps that time has come, or perhaps Summit just paid her a chunk of Twilight Eclipse’s record-breaking midnight opening box office haul.
There’s been a lot of talk as to what’s next after Breaking Dawn for the studio, even to the point of potential spin-off rumors that could explore the stories of secondary characters. It only makes sense that they first mine every existing piece of Twilight lore before creating original scripts.
[Click to See The First ‘Midnight Sun’ Poster]
Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) didn’t get much screentime in Twilight but we can expect him to be written in for a lot more for Edward’s version of the story.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 hits theaters November 18, 2011 and Part 2 releases November 16, 2012.
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