Twilight: Why The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner Was Never Adapted

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner was a Twilight spinoff novella released at the height of the saga’s popularity, so why was it never adapted?

Although the book was a bestseller upon its 2010 release, there is a good reason that the Twilight saga spinoff novella The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner never received a movie adaptation. It is notoriously tricky for movie studios to capitalize on pop culture phenomenon that are popular among teenagers. For every hit franchise that manages to ensnare the interest of adult viewers, like The Hunger Games, there are expensive flops whose target audience outgrows the source material before their adaptations can even hit theaters, like the (still-unfinished) Divergent movie series.

The Twilight movies seem to fall in the first camp as, while the franchise never attracted many adult viewers, the adaptations of Stephenie Meyers’ novel saga were financially successful. The Twilight adaptations mostly managed to strike while the series was still popular and made the most of the saga’s success before its target audience aged out of caring about Team Jacob and Team Edward. However, this did mean that the number of Twilight screen adaptations was limited, resulting in the spinoff novella The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner never received a movie of its own.

Released in 2010 to coincide with the arrival of Eclipse’s movie adaptation, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner was a brief book that filled in the blanks of the title character’s story. Unfortunately for the eponymous Bree, her second life was sad, short-lived, and bleaker than most of the Twilight saga. Twilight’s adaptation cut numerous major character deaths from its original script to ensure the movie’s story didn’t get too brutal, so it is unlikely that the studio would ever have committed to adapt the grim The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner on the big screen. However, even outside of this tonal imbalance, there are several reasons that the novella was never made into a movie despite being a bestseller at the height of the Twilight saga’s popularity.

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner Explained
The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner is a short interquel that explains who Bree Tanner was before her death, rebirth, and subsequent second death. It mostly focuses on the newborn vampire’s doomed romance with Fred, and eventually culminates in her being executed under the Volturi’s orders. Although this act established Twilight’s Volturi as the saga’s biggest and darkest villain, that alone was not enough reason for the novella to merit a standalone movie adaptation. As the title implies, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner didn’t have much plot to cover, and what little story the novella had was deeply depressing. However, that was not the only issue with a proposed adaptation.

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner’s Interquel Problem
Taking place midway through the action of Eclipse, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner was an interquel that focused on a side character at the same time that the main story took place, and the book didn’t add much to Eclipse’s plot in the way of the story. Interquels, while often fascinating to hardcore audiences, are by design alienating to casual viewers and tend to be the domain of novelizations and straight-to-DVD spinoffs. Eclipse was Twilight’s most underrated movie adaptation precisely because director David Slade trimmed a lot of fat from the source story and made a sharp, fast-paced adaptation of a novel that some critics called languid and plodding. Thus, spending more time on the fate of a minor character would have been antithetical to this aim, and the endeavor was unlikely to be profitable in financial terms as well as artistic terms.

Why The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner Would Be A Bad Movie
Twilight’s audience largely didn’t care enough about Bree Tanner to shell out the price of a cinema ticket for her fate, and the franchise’s creators knew that. Although her actor Jodelle Ferland has impressed viewers both before and since, Bree simply wasn’t all that well fleshed-out. As proven by Rosalie Hale’s dark Twilight backstory, there were more interesting side characters for Eclipse to focus its runtime on, and fans would likely have preferred a spinoff that depicts the Cullen family’s backstories in more detail as opposed to an adaptation of The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. A glimpse at the novella’s reviews – both from on the online forum Goodreads and from critics at the time of its release – echo this sentiment. Most of the Twilight fandom was in agreement that Bree Tanner was the last character who needed a self-contained project devoted to them, meaning they would be unlikely to care about a standalone movie following the character’s story.