ft.com/gapperblog

I am not sure quite what lesson to draw from the fact that Twilight, the vampire film that opens tomorrow, and could become a new Harry Potter-style franchise (for teen girls at least), has been made by a tiny studio after being dropped by Paramount Pictures.

The New York Times has an article this morning detailing how that fact that Paramount let Twilight and the other three books in the series by Stephenie Meyer slip through its fingers in 2006. It says that a “game of finger-pointing” is underway at Paramount.

I suppose a possible lesson is the traditional Hollywood one that “nobody knows anything”, as William Goldman, the script writer once put it. That was developed by Art De Vany, an economist, into a full-blown chaos theory of Hollywood production (as detailed by John Cassidy in The New Yorker in 2004).

On the other hand, you might have thought that someone at Paramount could have spotted that a plot about a teen vampire and his non-vampire girlfriend had something going for it commercially. In Paramount’s defence, it dropped the books just before they turned into bona fide global hits.

For Summit Entertainment, the studio that picked up the Twilight series from Paramount, this is a gratifying event. Its propulsion into the major leagues is reminiscent of Lionsgate, the studio that made it big with films including the Saw horror series and Crash.

I imagine Paramount’s slip will further darken the mood of Sumner Redstone, patriarch of Viacom, which owns Paramount. Mr Redstone has been struggling recently with debt problems at his National Amusements, his holding company.

November 20th, 2008 in Media | Permalink