The director of Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part. 1 and 2 has spoken about the backlash the franchise received. Bill Condon, best known for directing award-winning dramas like Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, was brought on board to direct the final two entries in the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn, splitting the final book into two entries like Harry Potter had done with The Deathly Hallows. Despite the Twilight franchise being a $3.3 billion box office success that also sold billions in merchandise, the franchise has been and remains widely criticized by a segment of people.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about his latest film, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Condon reflected on the experience of making Breaking Dawn and the backlash the Twilight Saga received. “Obviously, it became such a target for people, and people felt superior to it, and I thought, ‘God, you were really missing the point,'” Condon remarked, and added, “Because this is a big franchise that is in on the joke. For me, personally, as a gay director, I thought I brought a bit of camp to it that was permissible.” Condon looks back fondly and remembers, “I’ve never, ever heard a scream as loud and last as long as when we cut off Carlisle’s [Peter Facinelli] head.”
Condon also elaborated on the sometimes sexist critiques leveled at Twilight, particularly given its popularity among young women. He comments on how much of popular culture, particularly what is defined as the classics and worthy of serious consideration, is media aimed at men, and how men tend to be the dominant taste-makers. Condon said:
“I do think one of the things that’s remarkable about that is that Twilight is a franchise that is really women’s pictures, they call them. It is told from a female perspective. I can’t tell you how many times you talk about that movie and someone would say in the first one, ‘Well, nothing happens,’ but she gets married, she gives birth, she becomes a vampire…I do think, despite everything, we still live in a boy culture. And movies are a boy culture. The tastemakers, all of that stuff.
So I’ve really enjoyed doing it from a different sensibility…Maybe sometimes I think I was born in the wrong time because I do think of myself as being a kind of Hollywood classicist in a way. In that movie [Breaking Dawn], there was emotion, there was beauty, there was humor and visceral pleasure that I try to have in anything I make. And some of that the pleasure quotient isn’t necessarily at the center of where cinema culture is, so there are going to be people who resent it and detest it, but it becomes a kind of secret badge of honor.”
The ‘Twilight Saga’ Is Having a Cultural Moment Again
The Twilight films were never the high mark of cinema, as none of them have landed above 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it is fair to say the franchise was the target of more fanboy criticism. The Michael Bay Transformers films were released around the same time as the Twilight films, and they were arguably worse; despite being criticized, they were not given the same level of vitriol as the Twilight Saga.
Yet, in a strange twist of fate, Twilight has experienced a resurgence and cultural reappraisal. Nobody is arguing that they are great movies, but many are realizing they might have judged the rather harmless films too harshly. Stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have become some of the most exciting actors of the moment. It also helps that fellow 21st-century YA franchise, Harry Potter, has become rather toxic due to J.K. Rowling’s controversial views on transgender rights, and Twilight has become a semi-nostalgic comfort franchise for many millennials and older Gen-Z audiences.
In honor of the 20th anniversary of Twilight, Fathom Events is re-releasing all five films in theaters for one week. In 2023, Lionsgate announced that they were developing a television reboot of Twilight, similar to what HBO is doing with Harry Potter. It is hard to believe it has been thirteen years since Condon’s Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 2 opened in theaters, but it and the franchise’s overall legacy still continue to this day.