Twilight Sequel New Moon Gets New Director, Drops Hardwicke

Brace yourselves, “Twilight” fans. Put down your Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus albums and brace yourselves. Summit Entertainment has announced that they’re dropping “Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke from their sequel plans for “New Moon.” Well, they put it in a nicer way, of course:

“Catherine did an incredible job in helping us to launch the ‘Twilight’ franchise and we thank her for all of her efforts and we very much hope to work with her on future Summit projects,” Erik Feig, Summit’s president of production, said in a statement.

“We as a studio have a mandate to bring the next installment in the franchise to the big screen in a timely fashion so that fans can get more of Edward, Bella and all of the characters that Stephenie Meyer has created. We are able to pursue an aggressive time frame as we have the luxury of only adapting the novels into screenplays as opposed to having to create a storyline from scratch.”

In other words, things do not go smoothly with Hardwicke at the helm and the film received poor reviews, all the while pulling in big bucks. I think you could have put my three-legged dog behind the camera on “Twilight” and drooling teens would have still lined up for blocks at a chance to throw away their money.

Summit is still aiming for a 2010 release of the “Twilight” sequel, “New Moon,” so the time crunch is on. No word yet on who will replace Hardwicke, but I’d expect a more notable name now that they’ve locked in on their cash cow.

Update: Deadline Hollywood reports that Chris Weitz, director of “About a Boy”, “Golden Compass”, and “American Pie” (uncredited) will be Summit’s new choice for the two “Twilight” sequels. See, what did I tell you?

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