FYI post.
Update from GossipCop
There’s a chance The Twilight Saga could continue after the fifth film opens in November.

The bombshell was reportedly dropped by Jon Feltheimer, the chief executive officer of Lionsgate Entertainment, which acquired Twilight studio Summit Entertainment for $412.5 million on Friday.

“I’m anticipating Breaking Dawn – Part 2 being $700 million-plus in worldwide box office,” said Feltheimer of the final (planned) installment in the hit vampire franchise.

According to the Los Angeles Times, when asked whether Lionsgate could envision more Twilight past next fall’s fifth film, Feltheimer left the door open.

“It’s hard for me to imagine a movie that does $700 million-plus doesn’t have ongoing value,” he said. “It’s an amazing franchise that they have done a great job of maintaining with absolutely no deterioration.”
He added, “So the simple answer is, ‘Boy, I hope so.’”

It’s not clear whether a potential continuation would involve future films or a television series. Read in full at LA Times

Examiner What began as murmurs many moons ago has become a solidified deal: The Hunger Games film studio Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation has purchased Twilight Saga film studio Summit Entertainment for $412.5 million.

A Lions Gate press release (via The Wrap) on the same included the following quote from Co-Chairman and Executive Officer Jon Feitheimer and Vice Chairman Michael Burns:

“We are uniting two powerful entertainment brands, bringing together two world-class feature film franchises to establish a commanding position in the young adult market, strengthening our global distribution infrastructure and creating a scalable platform that will result in significant and accretive financial benefits to Lionsgate shareholders . . . Rob Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger have built a remarkable organization, and we’re pleased to welcome Summit’s talented team to the Lionsgate family.”

No word yet on whether this will have any impact on the release of Summit's biggest forthcoming film, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, other than the distribution company associated with its release.

The full details from Variety under the CUT

More after the jump

In case you're interested...if not skip it.

Deadline.com Days ago, Summit Entertainment took the unusual step of announcing it had identified and was filing criminal charges against an woman in Argentina identified as the "principal hacker who earlier this year stole unreleased materials from The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn which were then distributed on the internet." Now, Summit is responding to allegations made by Daiana Santia after she held her own press conference this morning ( PressCon link here in Spanish) to deny she was the master hacker depicted by Summit and the filmmaking team behind Twilight Saga. In her press conference, Daiana Santia reportedly said she only saw Twilight Saga images while combing the web and that she doesn't have the computer savvy to distribute them to anyone. She also claimed that she and her family were harassed by Summit in an attempt to go through her hard drive and that Santia is considering legal action of her own for harassment and defamation of character. She is also insisting that Summit's claims be handled in Argentina and not in the U.S.

Summit swiftly responded to her charges in a memo just sent to Deadline:

All under the CUT.

More after the jump

Entertainment Weekly Heads would have exploded. That’s the only reaction you can have after hearing Twilight producer Mark Morgan describe what almost became of Stephenie Meyer’s books. Morgan recalled the struggle to get the first film made. When the project was set up at Paramount — back before the books became a phenomenon and the fans were as vocal, in the studio’s defense — it was going to be an action movie. “I mean, one of their drafts literally had a Korean FBI agent who was hunting and tracking vampires across the coast. There was SWAT in the trees and literally it was like, ‘Red leader, red leader 1′ and the vampires were picking them out of the woods. It would have been a different movie,” Gordon said, one that likely never would have fallen into the hands of director Catherine Hardwicke. Other changes: “They had Bella fighting back. They had her father dying in one of the scripts, actually, and her becoming a vampire in the first movie. There were a lot of weird things that I don’t think they understood at the time, because the books were just becoming popular. By the time [the script] got to Summit, they were smart enough to say ‘You know what? Let’s throw out all the old scripts and let’s start from scratch.”  Can you imagine?

Dailyfill Wait, what?! That's right. Twilight Producer Mark Morgan gave the low down on what almost happened to your favorite vampires. In his own words, "[The fans] would have killed us."

Even if you haven't seen the Twilight flicks or read the series, you probably still know that the plot revolves around the love story between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. But before Summit bought the rights to the books, the original script swapped the brooding romance for non-stop action. At the time, studios didn't think Bella's endless lovesickness would interest anyone. Instead, the studio wanted to turn Bella into a vampire in the first movie and kill off her father.

"We went shopping to every studio around, but everyone passed," Morgan said. "Finally Summit said 'let's do it.' It was a total blessing."

Before long, Twilight became an international bestseller and Summit realized they had a blockbuster on their hands. A new script was written to appeal to the rabid fan base.

Just imagine if the original script had gone into production! The world might never have seen Taylor Lautner's abs, and Robert Pattinson would just be that guy who played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter.

Many 'WHAT IF...' scenarios playing around here. lol. I'm posting this old 2008 article that mentions this Paramount connection and yeah, it gave me major goosebumps. Read on.

BUFFY the vampire slayer has a new rival. A low-budget horror film, rejected by major Hollywood studios, is set to become the box-office blockbuster of the winter.  Twilight, based on the first of American writer Stephenie Meyer's hugely popular teenage vampire novels, premieres in London on December 3 and is expected to propel virtually-unknown British actor Robert Pattinson, to cult status.

Ticket sales for the movie's opening weekend in the US are expected to approach $60m (£40m), box office analysts said, driven by Meyer's devoted fans and marketing pyrotechnics by Summit Entertainment. Not bad for a film that cost just $37m to produce.

Thanks to classic Hollywood bungling, the fledgling company, normally ignored by major studios and agents, finds itself sitting atop one of the biggest pop-culture phenomena of recent years.

When Twilight opened in the US on Friday, audiences were greeted by Summit's logo: an abstract squiggle evoking a mountain ridge and not the more realistic mountain peak of Paramount Pictures, the studio that, at one time, controlled the rights to Twilight. Someone at the studio decided, in 2006, that the series was a dud. The current game at Paramount is to find out who deserves the blame.

When Paramount rejected Twilight, Friedman heard about it. Erik Feig, Summit's production chief, did some research and noticed an intense following online even though the book had not yet reached stratospheric status. Summit pounced, seeing a potential franchise.

"We saw a great Romeo and Juliet story that has a very interesting modern sensibility," Friedman said.

And the rest is TwiHistory...

NY MagWith Twilight: Eclipse closing in on what box office watchers say will surely be a $200+ million weekend, why have the faces of Summit Entertainment's executives taken on such a deathly pallor? It might be because Vulture hears that they've just agreed to write some very big checks, indeed: Insiders tell us that Summit will pay stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner each a whopping $25 million against 7.5 percent of the theatrical gross for starring in the next and last two Twilight movies, Breaking Dawn, Parts One and Two.

How much money will they end up taking home? The previous Twilight film, New Moon, took in almost $710 million worldwide, and Eclipse is on pace to exceed that. But let’s conservatively assume that both Breaking Dawns do as well as New Moon: After factoring in exhibitor splits, a lesser studio share for international releases, and other typical debited fees that would give you a migraine if they were explained here, each star would take in another $16 million total, giving them all final paydays of $41 million.

Meanwhile, Vulture has learned that Universal, upon hearing that this mammoth payday was being finalized, quickly sealed its deal with Lautner to star in Stretch Armstrong, for which they'll pay him $7.5 million, a sum that now seems like a yard sale.

RPLIfe

It's been one of the biggest questions surrounding Summit Entertainment's uber-successful "Twilight" franchise (apart, of course, from whether stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson really are a couple off-screen) -- just how the producers are going to manage to pull off a big-screen adaptation of "Breaking Dawn." The fourth book in Stephenie Meyer's juggernaut of a young adult fiction series about the epic love affair between high school student Bella Swan and her good-guy vampire beau Edward Cullen has plenty of heft, clocking in at upward of 750 pages, but it also has the distinction of being the most controversial entry in the saga.

When it was released in August 2008, fan reaction was intense and divided with some "Twi-hards" expressing confusion and dismay over a plot that involved *SPOILER ALERT* a recently graduated 19-year-old Bella giving birth to a half-human/half-vamp daughter named Renesmee, who grows much faster than the average mortal child and who possesses a unique way of communicating with those around her, clearly inherited from Dad's side of the family.

Wyck Godfrey, the producer of all the films in the "Twilight" saga, admits that the creative team still doesn't know how they'll handle the character in the "Breaking Dawn" movie, but said that the plan is absolutely for the production to go forward -- as either one or two installments -- with an eye toward beginning to shoot in Vancouver this fall. All three stars are signed for "Breaking Dawn," he said, meaning that Stewart and Pattinson will be dealing with the joys and woes of interspecies parenting and newly minted heartthrob Taylor Lautner will return as often-shirtless shape-shifter Jacob Black.

At the moment, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who's penned all the "Twilight" movies, is working on the "Breaking Dawn" script(s). "It's a work in process," Godfrey said in an interview Friday. "The issue [of whether there will be one or two movies] is not going to be resolved until we get the full treatment and see whether it's organic. 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."

Although there's been a great deal of online chatter about whether Chris Weitz, director of the second and most recent movie, "New Moon," would return to helm "Breaking Dawn," Godfrey downplayed that possibility, saying, "I think everyone would be happy and excited if he came back, but I don't think it's going to happen."

He and the other principals are formulating a list of potential directors, "but right now," Godfrey said, "we're just focused on the treatment and getting that right. At that point, we're going to see who's available and who's appropriate. It's such a complicated book because you have the emotions and the intensity of the love story -- so you need somebody who's just a wonderful director of actors -- and yet it's really complicated from an action and visual effects standpoint. They've got to have both tools in their kit."

A visual effects background might be particularly helpful when it comes to dealing with the character of Renesmee.

"I keep having visions of '[The Curious Case of] Benjamin Button' in my head," Godfrey said, referring to David Fincher's Oscar-nominated 2008 fantasy about a man who becomes physically younger as he ages. "It's certainly going to be visual effects in some capacity along with an actor. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being a full CG creation, but it also may be a human shot on a soundstage that then is used to shrink down. I don't know. We need a director. When we get a director, that director will need to come with a point of view of how they want to tackle it."

The third movie in the series, "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," is due in theaters June 30.

Gina McIntyreLA Times

Summary: Rob, Kristen, and Taylor are on board for BD, Chris Weitz is out of the directors pool for BD, still no definite plans if it will be 1 or 2 movies... I sense that they are still on the drawing board. And I am pretty sure there will be 2 movies. It is just too impossible to fit those 754 pages in a 90-minute film, I tell you. And it's all about the moolah baby. Need to milk the franchise to the last drop.

Honestly, Summit, what we need right now is an Eclipse teaser trailer - we can deal with BD a bit later.