Dawn of a new age

You thought the Twilight Saga was long gone, right? Wrong! It’s been announced that mini-movies are being planned to appear on Facebook. Now don’t get me wrong I was a diehard Twilight fan when I read the books and I counted down the days until the next film was released, but the saga ended in 2012 with Breaking Dawn. As I read further into the plans for these mini-movies I was torn, aspects of the project have such a positive objective whereas the backing from Lions Gate Entertainment just screams ‘greed’ seeing as Summit Entertainment made more than 1 billion on the Twilight hype it’s no wonder they want to revive the franchise and a piece of the action! But money can’t be the only thing that’s driving this project, so where did the idea originally come from?

Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books has spoken about the project’s plans of giving five budding female directors the chance to direct and compete in the competition The Storytellers – New Creative Voices of The Twilight Saga. ‘The female voice is something that has become more and more important to me as I’ve worked in the film industry’ this is an aspect of the project I can’t help but agree on, having female led media is just as important as our male counterparts but I think this project only highlights the massive gap in gender equality in the Film Industry; having five mini-movies on Facebook is nowhere in the league of blockbuster feature films being screened worldwide where 84% of directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors are men.

I agree that we have to start somewhere, and to start to make progress with gender equality women are having to find other ways of breaking into the industry and this may just be a trailblazer that many other projects will be born from. Especially since the project has a lot of support from strong females in the industry including Kate Winslet, director Jennifer Lee and Women In Film President Cathy Schulman. Even Kristen Stewart, our beloved Bella Swan will be on the judging panel. For all the pros and cons of this project I’m not going to sit here and say that I won’t watch and enjoy it, because let’s face it I probably will! After all how could Edward and Bella’s story really end, they are immortal after all…

By Talia Maguire