UPDATE: Apparently a little blogger fight is brewing as both Nikki Finke and Patrick Goldstein have posted new items regarding the on-going director story concerning Summit Entertainment’s Eclipse. Finke is now saying she never implied Juan Antonio Bayona had the job (which she actually did) and says Summit production prez Erik Feig has apologized to her and said he was misquoted in the Goldstein piece. Out of it all, we still have the result we were left with when I wrote this post originally… there is still no director attached to Eclipse. You can read another item regarding the brew-ha-ha right here. The originally story follows…
A couple of days ago Variety confirmed a story from Nikki Finke saying Summit Entertainment had hired The Orphange director Juan Antonio Bayona to direct Eclipse, the third film in the wildly successful Twilight series. I reported on the story here, but yesterday Patrick Goldstein at the Los Angeles Times posted a story in which he quotes president of production at Summit, Erik Feig, who denies the entire report.
“The Eclipse directing job hasn’t been offered to Juan Antonio or anyone else,” he told Goldstein. “We’ve met with three or four talented filmmakers and we’ll be meeting with three or four more other candidates before we make any decision. No one has been offered the job.”
The three or four he says Summit has already met are most likely the often discussed Bayona, Drew Barrymore, Paul Weitz and James Mangold, but the fact they are going to be talking to three or four more candidates is quite interesting following the confident reports we have already read.
Feig says neither Finke or Variety bothered to call to confirm the story, which isn’t exactly shocking in Finke’s case but Variety appears to have simply stolen Finke’s story without attribution, something the trade has been accused of by several bloggers in the past, but has never been so explicitly been found so guilty.
Sorry Twilight-ers, it looks like we still have to wait on a helmer.
