Cripes, ooof! Talk about your major, major goofs, no fuck-ups. Paramount’s MTV Film’s once owned the rights to the tween vampire goth sensation, “Twilight” but let it slip through their fingers?
Man, think that’s a big deal, Hollywood Elsewhere calls it a, “titanic miscalculation.” Apparently, MTV Films had the film rights, but put their development of the “Twilight” novels into turnaround back in 2006( the process in film production where the rights to a project one studio has developed are sold to another studio in exchange for the cost of development. Often used as jargon meaning the “death of a project.”) Essentially, it’s letting to go elsewhere for a small fee.
The L.A. Times examines what happened and there’s a quite the blame-game and finger pointing going on. The Times’ Patrick Goldstein says, “three ex-Paramount executives [have] all pointed the finger at Brad Weston, now the Paramount’s production chief.”
Weston of course is saying? Me? Why would I let a goldmine like that go? Essentially no one wants to be the fall guy for letting such a lucrative franchise go into the hands of a rival studio. Hindsight is 20/20, but still.
Weston passes the buck too and insists “he never killed the project, saying it 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.”
But of course, history shows for the record that the vampire-teen flick was put in turn-around in early 2006 and “Aversano didn’t take over MTV Films until late August 2006 and had no functional budget to buy projects until the year’s end. Cue that tugboat sound they play in the cartoons when someone fuck ups. Let’s see youth-film, youth demo, music, vampires, unrequited Teen love? Sounds like an project for MTV, no?
Weston evidently “questioned the genre’s commercial prospects,” again, 20/20, hindsight, all that, bu either way, not a good look, not good for business and not good for MTV Films that really haven’t had a major hit on their in a long time (some of their bigger films were “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America” and “Jackass: The Movie”). This would have been gangbusters for the whole company.
