With New Moon making over $230 million in the US and nearly $500 million worldwide, it was only a matter of time before the studio decided to try and milk the franchise for even more, and you really can’t blame them. There are two more books left in Stephenie Meyer’s series, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.
The film adaptation for Eclipse was shot alongside New Moon, Donner and Jackson style, and will hit theaters next year. Now it looks like Summit Entertainment will be splitting Breaking Dawn into two separate films. Some may or may not know what goes down in Meyer’s final book, but things get pretty intense.
In nearly 800 pages, the entire story gets tossed on it’s head, with characters falling in love with offspring, and a few more characters dying off. It makes sense to split a book that large into two films, in order to stay true to the source.
This strategy isn’t completely unheard of in Hollywood. The most recent example would be J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter films. The final book was 759 pages long (4 more than Breaking Dawn) and will be split into two films, one to be released in November of 2010, and the second in July of 2011.
Breaking Dawn won’t get a release until well into 2011, but before then Eclipse will be in theaters on June 30, 2010.
