Up until now, Summit Entertainment hasn't exactly set the movie world on fire. Run by veteran sales agent Patrick Wachsberger and former Paramount Vice Chairman Rob Friedman, the new indie distributor and finance company has struggled to prove that it can compete with the studio behemoths in the marketplace. Of its five releases, only one, the mixed martial arts film "Never Back Down," was a modest success, grossing about $25 million in the U.S. The company's most recent release, the teen comedy "Sex Drive," was a bomb, making barely $8 million after opening on nearly 2,500 screens.
But Summit has an amazing ace up its sleeve -- "Twilight." If you know a teenager, I need not say more. If you don't, the sound you hear in the distance is the approaching pop culture tsunami.
"Twilight" is the first in a series of enormously popular vampire love stories written by Stephenie Meyer that are now poised to spawn one of the hottest Hollywood literary franchises since "Harry Potter."
The film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke ("13" and "Lords of Dogtown"), arrives Friday on 5,500 screens with the industry already abuzz with reports about spectacular advance ticket sales. During the last few weeks, I've been hearing from studio marketing chiefs, who all seem in awe of the word-of-mouth groundswell for the film.
When the film's young stars, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, showed up at Comic-Con last July, they were greeted by Beatlemania-style screams. Last week, 10,000 kids showed up at a Dallas mall to mob them. They've been on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and several teen tabloids as well as all over MTV.
But what's amazing is that one of Hollywood's biggest studios had the project for years and simply let it go. "Twilight" was originally at Paramount's MTV Films, which spent nearly two years trying to develop the picture before the studio put the project in turnaround. A second studio, Fox Atomic, also passed on the project before it came Summit's way.
It wasn't as if "Twilight's" teen appeal was exactly a secret. The second novel in Meyer's series, "New Moon," debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times bestseller list for children's books when it was released in 2006. It hit No. 1 the following week and remained in the top position for 11 straight weeks. The fourth installment, "Breaking Dawn," sold 1.3 million copies in its first day of release. The entire series has now sold 8.5 million copies in the U.S., more than 17 million copies worldwide.
So how did this budding literary phenomenon practically drop in Summit's lap?
Long before "Twilight" hit the bookstores in 2005, MTV Films chief David Gale had read the novel in manuscript form and optioned the movie rights. MTV was always looking for teen-friendly film properties, and Gale felt the book had a great mix of genre elements -- notably the vampire angle -- and a surprisingly sweet take on teen romance.
"This is one of those projects we were especially passionate about," says Gale, who is now an executive vice president of new media at MTV. "We put a writer [Mark Lord] on the project who did a couple of drafts. We never got the script where we wanted it, but when it came time to renew the option, we needed Paramount's approval, and, for whatever reasons, we couldn't get a commitment, so the project went into turnaround. I'm disappointed that we didn't end up making the picture, but I'm thrilled that someone saw it through and that it's turned out to be such a big event."
As is often the case when a studio lets a hit slip through its hands, no one wants to take the blame. Gale would not say who at Paramount refused to renew the option. But I spoke to three ex-Paramount executives who all pointed the finger at Brad Weston, now the studio's production chief. Weston insists he never killed it, saying the project was the responsibility of Scott Aversano, who succeeded Gale as president of MTV Films and Nickelodeon Movies and is now an independent producer on the lot. However, by the studio's own timeline, the project was put in turnaround in early 2006. Aversano didn't take over MTV Films until late August 2006 and had no functional budget to buy projects until the year's end. MTV executives who were involved with the project say Weston questioned the genre's commercial prospects, telling them to watch "Cursed," a 2005 teen-oriented werewolf film that he'd made while an executive at Dimension Films that had failed at the box office.
