The Twilight Collection

Summit Entertainment picked up the film rights to Stephenie Meyer's novel after it had sat in development at Paramount for about three years without getting made. The timing was pointed: Summit had only just restructured itself from a financing and distribution outfit into a full-service studio a year earlier, and this was the project it chose to build that new identity around.

Catherine Hardwicke directed the first film in just 44 days on a $37 million budget, and it grossed close to $400 million worldwide — enough to remake Summit into a real studio and, eventually, make it an attractive enough asset that Lionsgate bought the company outright in 2012. Hardwicke didn't return for the sequels. By her own account in a recent interview, the reward she got from the studio for delivering that kind of hit was a single cupcake, while male directors in comparable positions elsewhere were getting cars or multi-picture deals. New Moon went to Chris Weitz, Eclipse to David Slade, and both halves of Breaking Dawn to Bill Condon — a different director nearly every time, with Hardwicke the only one not asked back.

That two-part Breaking Dawn is why four novels became five films. Summit split the book following the precedent Warner Bros. had just set with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a straightforwardly financial call: one adaptation becomes two box-office events instead of one. It meant renegotiating contracts with Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner, none of whom had signed on for more than four films.

The release pattern mattered as much as the films themselves. Twilight opened with $7 million from midnight shows alone in 2008; a year later, New Moon broke the all-time record for a midnight and opening-day gross. That annual, event-driven release rhythm became the template other studios copied when they went looking for their own YA franchise a few years later.