Since last Wednesday, Eclipse has made $175 million and is well on its way to matching, if not exceeding, New Moon’s $710 million international haul. As a result, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner secured $25 million for the next two films — and we have a suggestion for how the leftover cash might be spent: on making the rest of Edward’s vampire family, the Cullens, look as good as they’re supposed to. How much money does a vampire have to earn before she deserves a decent wig? Must the werewolves get all the make-up crew’s love and attention?
In the Twilight books, the Cullens, like all vampires, are described as “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel.†When the first Twilight film was released, a movie with a $37 million budget from Summit Entertainment, the Cullen’s cheeseball, helmet-hair look seemed like an intentionally campy cost-cutting measure. Now, a billion dollars later, would it be so terrible to make the actors who play these parts look as good onscreen as they do off? The actors who play the younger Cullens — Kellan Lutz, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone, Nikki Reed — are all mighty attractive: Can the producers not, in this of all things, stay true to the books and make these good-looking people look good?
Dr. Cullen, played by Peter Facinelli, is supposed to be “blond … and handsomer than any movie star I’d ever seen.†Huh. Does the handsomest movie star you’ve ever seen look like his hair is so brittle it should shatter on contact?
Next to Edward, Rosalie’s supposed to be the most beautiful Cullen. She’s “statuesque. She had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room. Her hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her back.†She is a natural blonde — who does she have to pay to get her eyebrows to match her wig?
Then there’s Alice, who, along with a pixie cut, is supposed to have a very keen fashion sense. (“No one dressed by me ever looks like an idiot,†she says in Breaking Dawn.) Someone in the costume department might want to reconsider her choker, then, which she wears throughout Eclipse and you can see in the image at the top of the page.
Finally, there are Emmet and Jasper: “Of the three boys, one was big — muscled like a serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still muscular, and honey blond.†We suppose this sort of describes the below images in fact, but not at all in spirit.