It’s the question everyone asks upon reading Stephenie Meyer’s zany fourth book: How could Breaking Dawn possibly be made into a movie?
The team behind Summit’s Twilight Saga movie franchise may not quite have the answer either, but they’re planning for a fall 2010 Breaking Dawn shoot nonetheless. (Which means you Twilighters can finally exhale.)
Twilight producer Wyck Godfrey told the L.A. Times that despite the challenging material, the creative team behind Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse is pushing forward to shoot Breaking Dawn right on the schedule that Robert Pattinson let slip back in November. What challenging material, you ask?
[SPOILER ALERT] You know, how Bella and Edward have a half-human, half-vampire baby who’s delivered in bloody fashion and grows at an accelerated rate into an uber-powered infant, and that X-Men III-like standoff between vampires with invisible super powers? [END SPOILERS]
Oh, right. And to pull it off with a PG-13 rating (and still make gazillions of dollars at the box office)? It’ll be a test on every front, from the writing to the acting and directing.
The good news for fans is that Melissa Rosenberg is back on the job penning Breaking Dawn. Rosenberg, who wrote the previous three Twilight films, has consistently kept fans happy with her faithful adaptations of Meyer’s books. Non-fans, however, have been less impressed. Nevertheless, fans can take comfort that Rosenberg knows how to approach the book; when FEARnet interviewed Rosenberg for New Moon, she was confident that Breaking Dawn’s mature material could be filtered for a PG-13 audience: “If I were to be writing that,” she told FEARnet, “I think there are many things that probably are inappropriate, and there are probably other things that can be implied. I don’t think that it will be a problem.”
But Breaking Dawn is still in its infancy, and even Godfrey doesn’t know if the book will be split into two films yet. “[It] is not going to be resolved until we get the full treatment and see whether it's organic,” he told the L.A. Times. “If it's not organic, I don't think it will be done, and if it is, it will be. It really has to do with how much level of detail from the books there is, with all of these new vampires that appear in Breaking Dawn, the whole section about Jacob... It's a very long single movie if it does become a single movie."
He also adds that it’s unlikely that New Moon director Chris Weitz will return to helm Breaking Dawn, and that producers are currently looking at potential directors.
What do you think, Twilighters? Would you like to see Breaking Dawn broken into two parts? Which directors do you think could make the PG-13 gore, CG elements, and all-important romance work best?
