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One of my most unpopular opinions has and always will be that while reboots and remakes should be outlawed, the Twilight film saga absolutely requires one. It’s a statement that typically elicits gasps, outrage, and hours of heated debate, which is why I love throwing it out when I’m feeling particularly spicy or sense that my dinner dates will be receptive to such a debate. Now, Kristen Stewart herself has admitted that she would love to direct a Twilight remake if the opportunity arose, and that’s about all the incentive I need to finally drop my Twilight opus.
The story surrounding the Twilight saga has fascinated me since the moment I stepped into that Macquarie Centre cinema in 2008. At the time, I was 17 years old, perpetually single, and battling through a HSC that I’d put way too much pressure on myself about. But after being struck down with a week-long flu, I read the four-book saga in a matter of days. As I flipped each page, I fell back in love with reading for pleasure. I was also able to live out the dream that I could be an angsty little loner and still meet the sexiest man alive and have him not only fall in love with me, but think I’m interesting, which is about the biggest compliment a 17-year-old could receive. That was the impact of Twilight, and that is what was lost in the film adaptations.
In many ways, the adaptations were doomed from the beginning. The film rights to Twilight were first picked up by Paramount Pictures’ MTV Films in 2004 and they sat dormant until Summit Entertainment snatched them up three years later and installed Catherine Hardwicke as the director. As an indie filmmaker, she made decisions that ultimately made Twilight the cult classic it is today, but for many fans (read: me), it wasn’t an adaptation that was made for the fans.
Hardwicke’s vision for Twilight was the indie dream, and while it may be hard to believe now, her casting of relatively unknown actors Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson as Meyer’s Bella Swan and Edward Cullen reflected that. In a 2022 interview with GQ, Pattinson admits as much, saying he “wanted to make it as arty as possible”.
But the film Hardwicke, Pattinson, and presumably Stewart wanted to make wasn’t fit for demand, thanks in part to the speed at which the landscape was changing at the time. In the year before Twilight’s November 2008 cinema release, sales of Stephenie Meyer’s books exploded from 8.5 million copies to 29 million in the US alone. That same year, Meyer had published Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the saga, and became the top-selling author in America. Suddenly, the indie vampire film with obscenely low-budget special effects and relentless blue colour grading was dropping in the middle of an all-out cultural phenomenon.
The other important detail is that Twilight was a simple love story that likely wasn’t going to win any literary awards, but it captured a moment. In the novel, Edward and Bella are as angsty as it comes, and the pipeline from strangers to married with a baby was at most two years, which is a detail that’s admittedly easier to overlook on a page than is it on a screen. The films’ directors — first Hardwicke and then Chris Weitz, David Slade, and Bill Condon after her — decided to lean into the absurdity of the stories, which resulted in films that mocked the story more than it honoured it and failed to redeem the questionable aspects of Meyer’s plot.
This is something romance lovers are used to. The impact of the romantic fiction genre has long been derided and underestimated by the mainstream and cultural critics, with a 2023 study by Poetics finding that feminised literary genres, such as romance, are least likely to be reviewed by mainstream critical outlets. They call it “gendered genre-based exclusion”. This is particularly obvious when it comes to supernatural romance stories, which in the case of Twilight, was admittedly ahead of its time.
Back in 2008, the romantasy genre (that is, books that straddle the romance and fantasy genres) didn’t exist. The books themselves existed, of course, but the cultural cache that came with them didn’t. That is no longer true in 2026. Take Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing series as an example. Her 2025 novel, Onyx Storm — the third in the Fourth Wing saga — sold about 2.7 million copies in its first week, making it one of the best selling books of all time, second only to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which came out in 2007.
All that’s to say, even though romantasy books are big business right now, they’re still disregarded in many literary circles due to good old fashioned sexism. Unfortunately, even in 2026, the romantasy genre isn’t widely respected. If you need any extra proof, you only need to look at a quote that a literary agent recently gave to Vulture. In an article titled ‘28 Book Industry Professionals Get Candid About the State of the Industry’, they said: “Romantasy needs to die; sorry, just watch a porno, you freaks”.
Perhaps this is why the first Twilight film received a modest budget of just US $37 million, which Hardwicke also credits to film execs’ believing “a movie for women is only going to make… $29 million”. Following the success of the film (it made US $69 million on opening weekend), Hardwicke was literally given a mini cupcake as a congratulations. “I walked into a room with all these gifts, and everybody was congratulating the studio, and they gave me a box. I opened it up, and it was a mini cupcake,” she told The Guardian, adding that male directors might instead be given “a car, or a three-picture deal”.
As for Hardwicke? Her franchise was handed off to a male director, and even a combined US $381 million budget over the next four movies couldn’t save it from shit wigs, bad makeup, and a terrifying animatronic baby. Which is to say nothing about the very valid criticisms that the film played into harmful racial stereotypes of Indigenous cultures. From top to bottom, the directors were so hell-bent on putting their own spin on the films that they forgot about the very audience they were purportedly serving.
This is a sentiment Stewart herself echoed on Monday. Though she stopped short of criticising the films she starred in, she told a reporter she would love to direct a remake of the iconic films. “Look, I love what Catherine [Hardwicke] did, I love what Chris [Weitz] did, I love what all of the directors did with the movies,” she told ET.
“They were so themselves and weird and kind of like, squirrelly, and just so present in that time when they didn’t really know what they were yet, like before they blew up,” Stewart said of the franchise. “Imagine if we had a huge budget and a bunch of love and support. I don’t know — I would love to readapt. Yeah, sure, I’ll do the remake. I’m doing it! I’m committed!”
Stewart has finally confirmed what so many Twilight fans have thought for years: that these films deserve a remake, sooner rather than later.
The post Kristen Stewart Finally Confirms What I’ve Long Thought: It’s Time To Remake The Twilight Movies appeared first on ELLE.
