Midnight Sun, a Twilight Animated Series, is Coming to Netflix

Television

In early 2023, it was reported that Lionsgate Television was working on a TV show based on Stephanie Meyer’s Midnight Sun, the 2020 retelling of Twilight from Edward’s point of view. In March of 2024, Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate, announced that it would be an animated series. Recontextualizing the popular book is hardly new, with Meyer writing Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined in 2015. That book gender-swapped the leads, Bella and Edward, while Midnight Sun merely tells the original story from Edward’s perspective instead of Bella’s. Variety reports that this series will be released on Netflix, written and executive produced by Sinead Daly (Raised By Wolves, Tell Me Lies, The Get Down). Stephanie Meyer will also serve as an executive producer, with Meghan Hibbert for Fickle Fish Films, Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen for Temple Hill Entertainment, Erik Feig and Samie Kim Falvey for Picturestart, with Emily Wissink of Picturestart showrunning. Lionsgate TV is producing. Interestingly, Temple Hill produced the Twilight live-action films as well. The original four Twilight novels, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn, were published between 2005 and 2008. The Twilight Saga film series produced five movies from 2008 to 2012, grossing over $3 billion at the global box office and catapulting the stars to celebrity status.

Well, I don’t like Twilight, so naturally, I can’t claim any excitement for Midnight Sun. I love animation, and Netflix surprisingly puts out a lot of good animated shows, but I just can’t get past the source material. I think it’s silly; I know Star Wars and other things I enjoy are silly, too, but I just couldn’t get behind the vampire-werewolf love triangle. I don’t usually like romance or stories set in high school, so Twilight was just never meant for me.

Beyond that, though, isn’t this a little late? Twilight was HUGE when I was in middle and high school, but I haven’t heard anything about it from anyone in years. Is the fan demand really still there? Would this fanbase be interested in an animated show? Do Twilight fans enjoy the reimagined books enough to justify a TV series? There are a lot of variables here, and I can admit that the people at Netflix probably know a lot more about it than I do. Although I don’t like Twilight, I think, in retrospect, that the backlash it received was overblown. Anything massively popular seems to attract a group of haters almost as big as its fanbase, for whatever reason. But now, I think most of us realize that labeling a book/movie that just wasn’t very good as sexist or abusive was a little bit much. I wonder if this series coming out has more to do with the re-evaluation of Twilight as a work than its real popularity.

All of this is to say, I don’t really know. I don’t know who this would be for these days, fifteen years after the craze started and well after it ended. I’d love to hear from fans of Twilight to see what that perspective would look like. Everything doesn’t have to be for everybody, and I’m sure this show will have fans. I just think Netflix could have capitalized on this cash cow better a few years earlier. It’s also worth noting that Robert Pattinson hated the movies and likely wouldn’t return to voice Edward in Midnight Sun. The showrunners would probably be smart to go in a completely different direction with this adaptation.

But what do you think about Twilight, Midnight Sun, or this animated series? Will you watch it? Were we all wrong about Twilight? Let us know in the comments!