Twilight Should Have Kept The Original Script’s “Bad Ass Bella”

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While the original script for Twilight’s movie adaptation strayed very far from the source novel saga, the blockbuster movies could have benefited from some of the changes made to Bella’s meek character. The Twilight series is not a set of blockbuster movies remembered primarily for their intense action set-pieces. Admittedly, directors like Catherine Hardwicke and David Slade added violence to the Twilight movies to heighten their stakes and make them more exciting, but the franchise was primarily famous for being a teen love story.

Following the small-town teenager Bella Swan, as she fell for brooding vampire Edward Cullen, the Twilight movies had the potential to be a thrilling set of “vampires vs humans” action thrillers. However, the Twilight novels they were adapted from focused more on Edward and Bella’s romance than chases, thrills, and gore. The Twilight movies were mostly faithful to the bestselling book series, resulting in movie versions that (for the most part) were light on action and heavy on drama.

Related: Twilight: Marcus’s Dark Backstory Explained

However, this was not always destined to be the case. Early on in the pre-production of Paramount’s canceled Twilight movie, original screenwriter Mark Lord wrote a script that turned Bella into a gun-toting action heroine who avenges the death of her father via human-on-vampire violence. While the treatment does sound faintly ludicrous, the premise of Bella being a shotgun-wielding vigilante is a strong one. The scrip draft’s death of Charlie Swan was unnecessary (as was Carlisle Cullen’s early exit), but the broader idea of Bella holding her own against bloodsuckers before falling for Edward could have made for a bloodier, more brutal, but still romantic