An animated show based on the Twilight retelling Midnight Sun is in the works. The 2020 Stephenie Meyer novel reinterpreted the events of the first book in the iconic romance series from the perspective of the vampire Edward Cullen rather than original protagonist Bella Swan. Although the manuscript on which the Twilight TV series will be based was being written early enough for it to be used to help Robert Pattinson prepare to play Edward in the 2008 Twilight movie, the first twelve chapters were leaked online, causing Meyer to cease writing the book for some time, delaying its publication.
Per Deadline, Netflix has announced that the Midnight Sun animated series, which has been in development at Lionsgate Television for nearly two years, has been given a straight-to-series order by Netflix. Sinead Daly will be writing in addition to executive producing. Daly is best known for being a writer on Tell Me Lies, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Other executive producers on the project are Stephenie Meyer, Meghan Hibbett, Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, Erik Feig, and Samie Kim Falvey. This will be the first onscreen installment in the franchise since the movie The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 premiered in 2012.
What Midnight Sun Means For The Twilight Franchise
The Twilight Animated Show Will Chart A Course For The Future
After the four original novels were adapted into five movies between 2008 and 2012, the franchise essentially went dormant. Although Meyer returned to the well with retellings including the gender-swapped 2015 novel Life and Death and Midnight Sun, she has not released any further sequels or spinoffs beyond the 2010 novella The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner that introduces new material into the canon. The same is true of the onscreen canon of the Twilight movies.
The creative decisions behind Midnight Suncould ultimately shape what the future of the onscreen franchise is going to look like. It seems unlikely that the entire Twilight cast could be assembled to reprise their roles, considering the fact that Pattinson especially has publicly grappled with his complicated relationship with playing the iconic leading man in the franchise, including telling Variety that he “stopped mentally progressing around the time when I started doing those movies” in 2018.
Even without a full original cast, if the characters are still modeled after the original actors, this will keep the new show in the canon of the movies. However, a complete redesign could act as a reboot, pushing the franchise into a new direction onscreen and leaving the door open for future live-action reinterpretations.
Our Take On Midnight Sun
It Might Be Time For More Twilight
Given the fact that the Twilight box office earned more than $3 billion between all five films, making it the 19th highest-grossing movie franchise in history at the time of writing, the time seems ripe for Midnight Sun. Now that Edward and Bella have been off screens for more than a decade, an animated retelling of their story could provide a fresh perspective that gives a shot in the arm to the popular long-running romance series.
