This Patrick Goldstein story is three days old and shame on me for not paying attention, but I didn’t understand the magnitude of Twilight until I saw it the night before last and particularly what a massive…no, titanic miscalculation it was for Paramount’s MTV Films to have put their development of the Twilight novels into turnaround back in ’06.

Brad Weston

Goldstein reports that “three ex-Paramount executives [have] all pointed the finger at Brad Weston, now the Paramount’s production chief.

Weston, naturally, “insists he never killed the project, saying it was the responsibility of Scott Aversano, who succeeded early Twilight champion David Gale, the MTV Films president who’s now a Paramount-based producer. “However, by the studio’s own timeline, the project was put in turnaround in early 2006,” Goldstein writes. “Aversano didn’t take over MTV Films until late August 2006 and had no functional budget to buy projects until the year’s end.

“MTV executives who were involved with the project say Weston questioned the genre’s commercial prospects, telling them to watch Cursed, a 2005 teen-oriented werewolf film that he’d made while an executive at Dimension Films, that had failed at the box office.”