In a different timeline, the constant conversation about the commercial and artistic value of movies for/from/about women and girls would have been nipped in the bud way back in 2008. In terms of pop culture impact, the year is best known for the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man and the cultural juggernaut that was The Dark Knight which elevated the comic book action blockbuster to a level of serious minded discourse and began the swift process in which the geek demographics essentially took over Hollywood and the entertainment media as a whole. But right alongside those two comic book superhero movies, we also had Sex and the City earning $411 million on a $60m budget and Mamma Mia! earning $609m worldwide (more than Iron Man and just $5m less overseas than The Dark Knight). Most importantly, we had the start of the Twilight franchise, which began ten years ago today.

It was only in late 2007 when Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov allegedly declared that he didn’t want to make any more female-fronted movies following the failures of Hilary Swank's The Reaping, Nicole Kidman’s The Invasion and Jodie Foster’s The Brave One. He denied saying as much and it’s worth noting that the 2008 WB slate included Sex and the City, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 and Nights in Rodanthe. WB did take some grief for tossing the Amy Poehler/Rachel Dratch/Parker Posey beach comedy Spring Breakdown straight to DVD, but the alleged comments kick-started a conversation about gender parity in mainstream film right as Hollywood was going full-tentpole at the expense of the kinds of dramas, romantic comedies and related studio programmer movies that would often star “not a white guy” leading actors and actresses in the central role(s). Into this conversation came the first Twilight.

Based on an already popular young adult fantasy series, the first Twilight was a rarity. It was a massively successful and zeitgeist-capturing blockbuster franchise starter with a female director (Catherine Hardwicke) at the helm and a female screenwriter (Melissa Rosenberg) adapting a book from a female author (Stephenie Myer). Even set within a slightly supernatural world populated by vampires and werewolves, and with a few action sequences here and there, the Twilight Saga was a blockbuster franchise that was, at its core, a romantic drama. The five-movie series may have earned critical scolding, Razzie nominations and a certain cultural disdain, but it also shattered conventional wisdom, became a gateway drug to a generation of “geek girls,” began a decade-long conversation about cultural tastemakers and gender-based critical double standards and reminded Hollywood that movies for/by/about women and girls were the opposite of box office poison.

The fans of Twilight have the Harry Potter franchise to thank for its good fortune. We can’t presume to know how the first film would have fared in its intended mid-December slot, but when Warner Bros. moved Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from November 21, 2008 to July 15, 2009, newbie distributor Summit Entertainment announced the Kristen Stewart/Robert Pattinson vampire romance as the designated pre-Thanksgiving fantasy movie of the season. By coincidence or design, the pre-Thanksgiving slot became a defacto launching pad for the biggest of the big YA fantasy flicks from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001 to the Twilight Saga and the Hunger Games sequels over the last few years. Between you and me, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Disney slotted Frozen 2 in this very frame for next year (instead of over Thanksgiving), but that’s for another day.

With mixed-negative reviews, the Harlequin romance sold itself to the book's fans and snagged a $35 million opening day. The weekend was frontloaded, but the $35m-budgeted flick had $69m by the end of its first three days. That was a record debut weekend for a solo/live-action female-directed title that would remain so until Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman in June of 2017. That’s because, even as Hardwicke’s indie sensibilities gifted that first installment with a quirky and self-deprecating charm and a wistful gaze that the sequels rarely touched, she and Summit clashed about scheduling and creative intent and the next four Twilight movies would be directed by men. That became something of a pattern with female directors kick-starting female-driven franchises (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Mamma Mia!, etc.) only for a dude to helm the sequel(s).

Twilight is still the best of the bunch, and I would argue that it is a “good” movie. It captures a certain adolescent yearning even as it also frames vampirism not as a metaphor for disease (Blade) or a rape (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but for sinful premarital sex. Even if the central love story is a drag, Twilight is filled with colorful friends and family who are smarter and world-wearier than our core duo. Bella’s friends (played by, among others, Anna Kendrick and Christian Serratos) had their own quirks and personalities, and the supporting characters (including Billy Burke who perhaps was too good as Bella’s dad) thought the central romance was just as dumb as the various real-world cultural naysayers. And there’s plenty of self-mocking weirdness and unapologetic goofiness (vampire baseball!) to make it a pleasure.

Part of the franchise’s cultural reputation lies with the whole “Ewww… girls!” thing, along with a certain inability to presume that young girls could consume imperfect pop culture without emulating its negative traits or presuming it to be gospel. It didn’t help that the franchise peaked in pop culture at New Moon, which was the worst movie of the series, both artistically (it is dreadfully boring) and morally. It’s where a lot of the whole “Edward and Jacob are both terrible boyfriends and a terrible role models!” stuff comes into play. New Moon, opening a year after the first one, was a true breakout sequel and earned a then-record $26 million midnight and $72 million Friday/opening day gross. Its $142m debut weekend was behind only Spider-Man 3 ($151m in 2007) and The Dark Knight ($158m in 2008).

It was a quick kill blockbuster (a 1.97x weekend multiplier and a 2.08x weekend-to-final multiplier), but $296 million domestic and $709m worldwide on a $50m budget is a win. Of note, much of the conversation around the sequels focused on fans choosing with which hot guy (Pattinson’s Edward Cullen or Taylor Lautner’s Jacob Black) Bella should end up. Were you #TeamJacob or #TeamEdward? Yet, if you watch the movies (I can’t speak for the books), there is no love triangle as Bella is 95% determined to be with the vampire and gives only passing thoughts to ending up with the werewolf. David Slade’s Twilight Saga: Eclipse was the only one that opened in the summer, just six months after New Moon, and it is notable for being the most horror flavored and offering the sharpest rebuttal to the franchise’s critics.

Anna Kendrick’s graduation speech implicitly condemns the core romance, as she tells her fellow graduates to “make mistakes, take the wrong train and get stuck somewhere chill, fall in love (a lot)” and otherwise don’t make “hard and fast decisions” about the 150-year-old immortal neighbor who represents your first serious relationship and settle down right out of high school. Bella’s mother (Sarah Clarke) and Edward’s family attempt to redirect her too, but Bella is (for better or worse) focused on Edward even when Edward himself spends much of Eclipse trying to dissuade her from choosing to become a vampire upon graduation. It closes on a speech whereby the girl declares that it was never about the boy, but rather between choosing between feeling out of place in the normal world or feeling at home or a sense of belonging in the vampire world.

It’s at the end of the third film when we realize that, warts and all, we’ve been watching a loose revamp of The Little Mermaid. When I was nine years old and first saw the Disney toon on VHS, I too saw a story about a young girl who essentially walked/swam away from her life for a guy who she barely knew. That’s essentially what happened. But as I got older I noticed that Ariel wanted to be part of the human world before she met Eric and only pursued him after her father got angry and destroyed all of her human stuff. She only gave up her voice for a presumably temporary wager, after which she’d keep her legs and get her voice back. That may not be grand judgment, but it’s a classic Disney fairy tale structure.

Like Belle, Ariel and Rapunzel, Bella wanted something more than her provincial life and found in partially in a foreign terrain and via a “bad romance.” The Twilight Saga was a primal fairytale romance brought to life, warts and all, about a young girl who didn’t fit in and just wanted to be part of that world. Even if Eclipse was making retroactive excuses for an unhealthy romantic entanglement, the finale of the third picture (which, at $300 million domestic, was the biggest U.S. earner of the bunch) which had a big battle and the aforementioned monologues, was a fitting series finale even if the show ran on for two more movies. Bill Condon’s Breaking Dawn part I and Breaking Dawn part II (released in November of 2011 and 2012 respectively) had gothic fun with the admittedly weird source material.

Breaking Dawn Part I gave us dogs talking to each other through subtitled barking, Bella’s wedding, her bed-wrecking first sexual encounter and her surprise pregnancy which resulted in Edward tearing the kid out of Bella’s body with his fangs and then turning his new wife into a vampire. Breaking Dawn Part II has a certain self-aware camp (“You named my baby after the Loch Ness monster?!”) and both the great “Michael Sheen giggle” and an all-time classic action sequence. Considering the extent to which the Twilight saga was considered “lesser” or artistically less worthwhile than boy-friendly action fantasies, it is the girl-targeted fairytale romance that contains the greatest superhero/super-powered mass battle sequence ever. Heads are torn off, the Earth cracks open, and all kinds of monster mash carnage unfolds as the vampires and the werewolves war with the ruling vampire clan. Trust me, it’s friggin awesome.

Whether you think The Twilight Saga is worse than Human Centipede 3, better than Godfather 2 or somewhere in between, it pulled off something remarkable in its short lifespan. Summit Entertainment released five moves in four years with a combined budget of $373 million which earned a total of $3.341 billion worldwide. They rebuffed conventional wisdom about female-driven (and non-action specific) movies doing top-tier box office, and they did it (save for Eclipse playing in IMAX in the summer of 2010 and Breaking Dawn 2 getting some overseas IMAX screens) without the benefit of 3-D conversions or various PLF auditoriums. They were huge overseas too. Breaking Dawn Part II earned $537m overseas, or $14m more than Rogue One four years later, again disproving conventional wisdom about what kind of movies made certain amounts of money.

The sequels were also a model of box office consistency. New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn part I and Breaking Dawn part II earned between $281 million and $300m domestic. The three “opened in mid-November” sequels all earned between $138m and $142m on opening weekend, while Eclipse opened on a Wednesday (with a $30m midnight gross and $68m opening day) and nabbed $176m over its Wed-Mon July 4^th weekend debut. The three November sequels all scored an over/under 2x weekend multiplier and an over/under 2x weekend-to-domestic-total-multiplier. The franchise may have earned few “new” fans in North America after the second movie, but the fans showed up, with bells on, for the next three chapters in large-enough numbers to not need general audiences or converts. When the ceiling for a $50m-$100m sequel is $300m domestic, you don’t need newbies.

The four Twilight sequels out-grossed (at the time) every superhero movie not focused on Batman, Spider-Man or Iron Man. Breaking Dawn Part II earned $829 million worldwide, just over/under the likes of (offhand) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Wonder Woman and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. They pulled $138m-$142m opening weekends and $281m-$300m grosses without 3-D or much in the way of PLF help. They left Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson with enough money to make acclaimed indie flicks for the rest of their lives. Love it or hate it, Twilight was (and this is an important point) a rare female-led blockbuster franchise (like the delightful and super-duper gay new Netflix She-Ra show) that actually had multiple and varied female characters. Even if you hated Bella, she wasn’t supposed to represent an entire gender.

Yes, there were fans who perhaps too the franchise a bit too seriously, although you could say the same about the boys and men who took Joker’s Dark Knight monologues too much to heart and/or turned the obsessive fandom of Zack Snyder’s DC Films movies into an online blood sport. But I saw Breaking Dawn part II in pre-opening day Thursday night screening packed with excited “Twihards.” These fans laughed at all the right moments, as well as at many of the wrong ones. They relished the saga’s character-focused pleasures with neither endorsement or judgment. When a certain act of climactic violence occurred right at the end, something that absolutely wasn’t in the book, the deafening roar of horror, laughter and befuddled excitement was unlike anything I have ever encountered before or since in a theatrical screening.

Twilight showed that you could earn tentpole grosses without tentpole budgets and while playing almost exclusively to female audiences. It should that a female director could launch a new blockbuster franchise as well as any male director. It was an example of fan-driven consistency from the beginning to the end, and it was yet another example of a franchise flourishing alongside more conventional blockbusters precisely because it offered an entirely unique-unto-itself experience. It was the “next” Harry Potter because it had little in common with Harry Potter, just as Hunger Games was the “next” Twilight because it had little in common with Twilight. Twilight emphasized character over plot and romance over action. It rewrote the rulebook in terms of what kind of movie could reach blockbuster status. It taught Hollywood lessons that it still has yet to fully digest.

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Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in 'The Twilight Saga: Eclipse'

Summit Entertainment

In a different timeline, the constant conversation about the commercial and artistic value of movies for/from/about women and girls would have been nipped in the bud way back in 2008. In terms of pop culture impact, the year is best known for the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man and the cultural juggernaut that was The Dark Knight which elevated the comic book action blockbuster to a level of serious minded discourse and began the swift process in which the geek demographics essentially took over Hollywood and the entertainment media as a whole. But right alongside those two comic book superhero movies, we also had Sex and the City earning $411 million on a $60m budget and Mamma Mia! earning $609m worldwide (more than Iron Man and just $5m less overseas than The Dark Knight). Most importantly, we had the start of the Twilight franchise, which began ten years ago today.

It was only in late 2007 when Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov allegedly declared that he didn’t want to make any more female-fronted movies following the failures of Hilary Swank's The Reaping, Nicole Kidman’s The Invasion and Jodie Foster’s The Brave One. He denied saying as much and it’s worth noting that the 2008 WB slate included Sex and the City, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 and Nights in Rodanthe. WB did take some grief for tossing the Amy Poehler/Rachel Dratch/Parker Posey beach comedy Spring Breakdown straight to DVD, but the alleged comments kick-started a conversation about gender parity in mainstream film right as Hollywood was going full-tentpole at the expense of the kinds of dramas, romantic comedies and related studio programmer movies that would often star “not a white guy” leading actors and actresses in the central role(s). Into this conversation came the first Twilight.

Based on an already popular young adult fantasy series, the first Twilight was a rarity. It was a massively successful and zeitgeist-capturing blockbuster franchise starter with a female director (Catherine Hardwicke) at the helm and a female screenwriter (Melissa Rosenberg) adapting a book from a female author (Stephenie Myer). Even set within a slightly supernatural world populated by vampires and werewolves, and with a few action sequences here and there, the Twilight Saga was a blockbuster franchise that was, at its core, a romantic drama. The five-movie series may have earned critical scolding, Razzie nominations and a certain cultural disdain, but it also shattered conventional wisdom, became a gateway drug to a generation of “geek girls,” began a decade-long conversation about cultural tastemakers and gender-based critical double standards and reminded Hollywood that movies for/by/about women and girls were the opposite of box office poison.

The fans of Twilight have the Harry Potter franchise to thank for its good fortune. We can’t presume to know how the first film would have fared in its intended mid-December slot, but when Warner Bros. moved Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from November 21, 2008 to July 15, 2009, newbie distributor Summit Entertainment announced the Kristen Stewart/Robert Pattinson vampire romance as the designated pre-Thanksgiving fantasy movie of the season. By coincidence or design, the pre-Thanksgiving slot became a defacto launching pad for the biggest of the big YA fantasy flicks from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001 to the Twilight Saga and the Hunger Games sequels over the last few years. Between you and me, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Disney slotted Frozen 2 in this very frame for next year (instead of over Thanksgiving), but that’s for another day.

With mixed-negative reviews, the Harlequin romance sold itself to the book's fans and snagged a $35 million opening day. The weekend was frontloaded, but the $35m-budgeted flick had $69m by the end of its first three days. That was a record debut weekend for a solo/live-action female-directed title that would remain so until Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman in June of 2017. That’s because, even as Hardwicke’s indie sensibilities gifted that first installment with a quirky and self-deprecating charm and a wistful gaze that the sequels rarely touched, she and Summit clashed about scheduling and creative intent and the next four Twilight movies would be directed by men. That became something of a pattern with female directors kick-starting female-driven franchises (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Mamma Mia!, etc.) only for a dude to helm the sequel(s).

Twilight is still the best of the bunch, and I would argue that it is a “good” movie. It captures a certain adolescent yearning even as it also frames vampirism not as a metaphor for disease (Blade) or a rape (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but for sinful premarital sex. Even if the central love story is a drag, Twilight is filled with colorful friends and family who are smarter and world-wearier than our core duo. Bella’s friends (played by, among others, Anna Kendrick and Christian Serratos) had their own quirks and personalities, and the supporting characters (including Billy Burke who perhaps was too good as Bella’s dad) thought the central romance was just as dumb as the various real-world cultural naysayers. And there’s plenty of self-mocking weirdness and unapologetic goofiness (vampire baseball!) to make it a pleasure.

Part of the franchise’s cultural reputation lies with the whole “Ewww… girls!” thing, along with a certain inability to presume that young girls could consume imperfect pop culture without emulating its negative traits or presuming it to be gospel. It didn’t help that the franchise peaked in pop culture at New Moon, which was the worst movie of the series, both artistically (it is dreadfully boring) and morally. It’s where a lot of the whole “Edward and Jacob are both terrible boyfriends and a terrible role models!” stuff comes into play. New Moon, opening a year after the first one, was a true breakout sequel and earned a then-record $26 million midnight and $72 million Friday/opening day gross. Its $142m debut weekend was behind only Spider-Man 3 ($151m in 2007) and The Dark Knight ($158m in 2008).

It was a quick kill blockbuster (a 1.97x weekend multiplier and a 2.08x weekend-to-final multiplier), but $296 million domestic and $709m worldwide on a $50m budget is a win. Of note, much of the conversation around the sequels focused on fans choosing with which hot guy (Pattinson’s Edward Cullen or Taylor Lautner’s Jacob Black) Bella should end up. Were you #TeamJacob or #TeamEdward? Yet, if you watch the movies (I can’t speak for the books), there is no love triangle as Bella is 95% determined to be with the vampire and gives only passing thoughts to ending up with the werewolf. David Slade’s Twilight Saga: Eclipse was the only one that opened in the summer, just six months after New Moon, and it is notable for being the most horror flavored and offering the sharpest rebuttal to the franchise’s critics.

Anna Kendrick’s graduation speech implicitly condemns the core romance, as she tells her fellow graduates to “make mistakes, take the wrong train and get stuck somewhere chill, fall in love (a lot)” and otherwise don’t make “hard and fast decisions” about the 150-year-old immortal neighbor who represents your first serious relationship and settle down right out of high school. Bella’s mother (Sarah Clarke) and Edward’s family attempt to redirect her too, but Bella is (for better or worse) focused on Edward even when Edward himself spends much of Eclipse trying to dissuade her from choosing to become a vampire upon graduation. It closes on a speech whereby the girl declares that it was never about the boy, but rather between choosing between feeling out of place in the normal world or feeling at home or a sense of belonging in the vampire world.

It’s at the end of the third film when we realize that, warts and all, we’ve been watching a loose revamp of The Little Mermaid. When I was nine years old and first saw the Disney toon on VHS, I too saw a story about a young girl who essentially walked/swam away from her life for a guy who she barely knew. That’s essentially what happened. But as I got older I noticed that Ariel wanted to be part of the human world before she met Eric and only pursued him after her father got angry and destroyed all of her human stuff. She only gave up her voice for a presumably temporary wager, after which she’d keep her legs and get her voice back. That may not be grand judgment, but it’s a classic Disney fairy tale structure.

Like Belle, Ariel and Rapunzel, Bella wanted something more than her provincial life and found in partially in a foreign terrain and via a “bad romance.” The Twilight Saga was a primal fairytale romance brought to life, warts and all, about a young girl who didn’t fit in and just wanted to be part of that world. Even if Eclipse was making retroactive excuses for an unhealthy romantic entanglement, the finale of the third picture (which, at $300 million domestic, was the biggest U.S. earner of the bunch) which had a big battle and the aforementioned monologues, was a fitting series finale even if the show ran on for two more movies. Bill Condon’s Breaking Dawn part I and Breaking Dawn part II (released in November of 2011 and 2012 respectively) had gothic fun with the admittedly weird source material.

Breaking Dawn Part I gave us dogs talking to each other through subtitled barking, Bella’s wedding, her bed-wrecking first sexual encounter and her surprise pregnancy which resulted in Edward tearing the kid out of Bella’s body with his fangs and then turning his new wife into a vampire. Breaking Dawn Part II has a certain self-aware camp (“You named my baby after the Loch Ness monster?!”) and both the great “Michael Sheen giggle” and an all-time classic action sequence. Considering the extent to which the Twilight saga was considered “lesser” or artistically less worthwhile than boy-friendly action fantasies, it is the girl-targeted fairytale romance that contains the greatest superhero/super-powered mass battle sequence ever. Heads are torn off, the Earth cracks open, and all kinds of monster mash carnage unfolds as the vampires and the werewolves war with the ruling vampire clan. Trust me, it’s friggin awesome.

Whether you think The Twilight Saga is worse than Human Centipede 3, better than Godfather 2 or somewhere in between, it pulled off something remarkable in its short lifespan. Summit Entertainment released five moves in four years with a combined budget of $373 million which earned a total of $3.341 billion worldwide. They rebuffed conventional wisdom about female-driven (and non-action specific) movies doing top-tier box office, and they did it (save for Eclipse playing in IMAX in the summer of 2010 and Breaking Dawn 2 getting some overseas IMAX screens) without the benefit of 3-D conversions or various PLF auditoriums. They were huge overseas too. Breaking Dawn Part II earned $537m overseas, or $14m more than Rogue One four years later, again disproving conventional wisdom about what kind of movies made certain amounts of money.

The sequels were also a model of box office consistency. New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn part I and Breaking Dawn part II earned between $281 million and $300m domestic. The three “opened in mid-November” sequels all earned between $138m and $142m on opening weekend, while Eclipse opened on a Wednesday (with a $30m midnight gross and $68m opening day) and nabbed $176m over its Wed-Mon July 4^th weekend debut. The three November sequels all scored an over/under 2x weekend multiplier and an over/under 2x weekend-to-domestic-total-multiplier. The franchise may have earned few “new” fans in North America after the second movie, but the fans showed up, with bells on, for the next three chapters in large-enough numbers to not need general audiences or converts. When the ceiling for a $50m-$100m sequel is $300m domestic, you don’t need newbies.

The four Twilight sequels out-grossed (at the time) every superhero movie not focused on Batman, Spider-Man or Iron Man. Breaking Dawn Part II earned $829 million worldwide, just over/under the likes of (offhand) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Wonder Woman and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. They pulled $138m-$142m opening weekends and $281m-$300m grosses without 3-D or much in the way of PLF help. They left Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson with enough money to make acclaimed indie flicks for the rest of their lives. Love it or hate it, Twilight was (and this is an important point) a rare female-led blockbuster franchise (like the delightful and super-duper gay new Netflix She-Ra show) that actually had multiple and varied female characters. Even if you hated Bella, she wasn’t supposed to represent an entire gender.

Yes, there were fans who perhaps too the franchise a bit too seriously, although you could say the same about the boys and men who took Joker’s Dark Knight monologues too much to heart and/or turned the obsessive fandom of Zack Snyder’s DC Films movies into an online blood sport. But I saw Breaking Dawn part II in pre-opening day Thursday night screening packed with excited “Twihards.” These fans laughed at all the right moments, as well as at many of the wrong ones. They relished the saga’s character-focused pleasures with neither endorsement or judgment. When a certain act of climactic violence occurred right at the end, something that absolutely wasn’t in the book, the deafening roar of horror, laughter and befuddled excitement was unlike anything I have ever encountered before or since in a theatrical screening.

Twilight showed that you could earn tentpole grosses without tentpole budgets and while playing almost exclusively to female audiences. It should that a female director could launch a new blockbuster franchise as well as any male director. It was an example of fan-driven consistency from the beginning to the end, and it was yet another example of a franchise flourishing alongside more conventional blockbusters precisely because it offered an entirely unique-unto-itself experience. It was the “next” Harry Potter because it had little in common with Harry Potter, just as Hunger Games was the “next” Twilight because it had little in common with Twilight. Twilight emphasized character over plot and romance over action. It rewrote the rulebook in terms of what kind of movie could reach blockbuster status. It taught Hollywood lessons that it still has yet to fully digest.

It's been ten years since Bella and Edward became a thing.
This week, on November 21, 2008 -- fans squee'd in theaters upon the release of the first 'Twilight' movie. As obsessively as fans pored over every detail of the supernatural romance, there's still much you may not know about the five-film series.
Here are the dark (and not-so-dark) secrets of how the best-selling Stephenie Meyer novels sank their fangs into the multiplex.
1. MTV Films optioned the 'Twilight' books way back in 2004, but their version of the saga would have been so unlike the novels as to be nearly unrecognizable. There was talk of night-vision goggles and making Bella a cool jock instead of a shy loner and... oh, we just can't even.
2. Thankfully, when Summit Films wound up with the rights, the indie studio promised Meyer greater fidelity, even writing into its contract language that stipulated the modest length of the vampires' fangs.
3. Meyer's casting ideas for Bella and Edward were The Tudors').
4. Director Catherine Hardwicke thought of Kristen Stewart after seeing the 17-year-old in her brief but acclaimed performance in 'Into the Wild.' She confirmed her instinct once she flew to Pittsburgh to audition Stewart while the actress was in the midst of shooting the indie film 'Adventureland.'
5. Robert Pattinson came aboard as Edward just three weeks before production started, at the suggestion of a low-level Summit staffer who was impressed by the English actor's performance as the ill-fated Cedric Diggory in 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.' Summit flew him to California, where his audition consisted of a love scene with Stewart, acted out on Hardwicke's own bed at her Venice home. 'It was electric,' Hardwicke told Entertainment Weekly. 'The room shorted out, the sky opened up, and I was like, 'This is going to be good.'
6. The first 'Twilight' movie cost just $39 million to make, a budget that was sofa-cushion change for a would-be blockbuster / franchise launcher even in 2008. It earned back $193 million in North America and another $201 million overseas.
7. As Jacob, Taylor Lautner proved as much a fan-fave heartthrob as Pattinson's Edward. Yet the producers almost recast Jacob after the first film, fearing that Lautner wasn't brawny enough to play the maturing teen werewolf. Fortunately, before shooting began on 'New Moon,' Lautner hit the gym and added 30 pounds of muscle. Mostly in his now-iconic abs, we'd guess.
8. Rachelle Lefevre wasn't so lucky. After playing the villainous vampire Victoria in the first two movies, she lost the part in 'Eclipse' due to a scheduling conflict with 'Barney's Version.' That indie drama needed her on the set for just 10 days that overlapped with the three-month 'Eclipse' shoot. She figured Summit would make accommodations for her. Instead, the studio replaced her with Bryce Dallas Howard, who'd turned down the chance to play Victoria in the first 'Twilight' because she'd felt the part was too small.
9. The final two movies, 'Breaking Dawn' Parts 1 and 2, cost a combined $230 million to make. Of that $230 million, Stewart, Pattinson, and Lautner each got $25 million, plus 7.5 percent of the gross receipts, making them (for a brief, shining moment) among the highest paid actors in Hollywood history.
10. All told, the five-movie franchise grossed $1.4 billion in North America and a total of $3.3 billion worldwide.
11. Might there be further 'Twilight' movies? There might, if Meyer revisits her universe the way J.K. Rowling has with her 'Harry Potter' spinoff 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.'
'It's a possibility,' Lionsgate co-chairman Patrick Wachsberger said in September. (Lionsgate took over the franchise when it bought Summit in 2012.) 'Not a certainty but it's a possibility. It's about Stephenie. If she wants to tell a story related to those characters, we're here for her.'