Twilight Is Much Better Than You Think | Den Of Geek

Twilight is funny. But Bella isn’t funny. Which is part of what makes it funny. Another weapon Hardwicke has in her arsenal is Anna Kendrick, as Bella’s very lovely friend Jessica. Kendrick is massive now and very clearly has great comic timing but Twilight was a breakout for her. Jessica is the anti-Bella. Cute and comfortable with her cuteness, incredibly tolerant with Bella, she’s a generally speaking well adjusted young woman, and Kendrick nails it. It’s notable, for example, how often she responds to Bella by saying “ha ha yeah, that’s really funny” (and not sarcastically) which actually draws attention to how NOT funny Bella is. Or how, while Bella is mooning out the window pining for Edward, Jessica is commenting on how good her boobs look in the prom dress she’s trying on. She’s a wonderful antidote, and Hardwicke knew exactly what she was doing in casting her.

The elephant in the room is perhaps Taylor Lautner as Jacob. Not the strongest of the cast and less of a breakout post-Twilight than the two leads and Kendrick (though Lautner did prove he can also do comedy with his regular role in Brit show Cuckoo), Jacob did become a counterpart for people who liked their chaps a bit less pasty and a bit more buff.

Hardwicke made Twilight an enormous hit, grossing more than $400 million worldwide and setting up a franchise which would go on to gross over $3.3 billion. But after the first film she was out. Though she was offered part two it was on the proviso that it come out just a year after part one which gave her too tight a turnaround to be able to deliver the film she wanted to make. Instead the rest of the franchise went to male directors.

Talking to Vanity Fair in 2018, ten years after she launched the franchise, Hardwicke points out that her film kicked off a trend of female-led YA movies including the three Divergent films and the four Hunger Games movies none of which were directed by women, saying “that was a heartbreak for me. There are other badass women out there that could have done those.”

Whether you like Twilight or not, it was an undeniably successful movie which truly understood its audience. Years later studios are still trying to capture that magic again – YA romances have come and gone to various degrees of success, but Twilight is the one that endures. Whether teenagers of 2021 discovering the film for the first time will still identify as acutely remains to be seen, but either way, as a cultural phenomenon Twilight is way smarter than a sparkly vampire movie deserves to be.

The Twilight movies are available to stream on Netflix now.