It was pretty shocking to me when I heard the news that Twilight director, Catherine Hardwicke, would not be returning to direct the sequel. Twilight made truck loads of money and because the highest opening weekend box office take of any film directed by a woman in history. Yes it met with some critical abuse… but when the film makes big money that usually doesn’t matter. So last week the studio and Hardwicke jointly announced (rather suspiciously I might add) that Hardwicke would not be returning to the sequel do to a scheduling conflict (yeah right). So ever since then the question has been… who will direct Twilight 2?
The rumor going around right now is that the director of “The Golden Compass”, Chris Weitz (who also directed “About a Boy” which I thought was wonderful) has been offered the gig for both Twilight 2 and 3 (which are rumored to be shooting back to back. The following comes from Deadline Hollywood:
I don’t have official confirmation yet that this Twilight sequel offer has gone out to Weitz. But my insider says another reason it came down is because Weitz and Summit’s president of production Eric Feig are longtime pals. The source tells me Weitz is “still considering” the offer to helm New Moon and possibly also Eclipse if the sequel and threequel movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s series of vampire books are made back-to-back. But let’s also not forget Weitz’s behavior on Golden Compass. On December 15, 2004, Weitz announced his resignation as director of the trilogy, citing the enormous technical challenges of the epic and later admitting he was worried about dissing by the book’s fans.
Wow… if this guy was afraid of The Golden Compass fans… he should probably fear for his life from the Twilight fans. These people are absolutely insane about these books, and I’m pretty sure if you screw up their story, they’ll put a Boba Fett sized price on your head… or they’ll just kill you with their own hands.
Personally, I think that if this rumor is true, it’s not a bad pick at all. I really enjoyed how he handled About A Boy and I don’t think Compass turned out as badly as it could have. Guess we’ll have to wait and see if this one turns out to be true.
