Irrational teenage girls, here’s a lesson – you can get anything you want in life with a healthy dose of screaming obnoxiousness.

It certainly worked with Taylor Lautner and New Moon. After being told that he was too much of a scrawny little runt to continue playing werewolf Jacob Black in the Twilight sequel, a wave of berserk quasi-emo outrage from Taylor’s female teenage fanbase has kept him the job.

True, this means that Robert Pattinson will be replaced by a plank of wood with a merkin on its head for New Moon instead, but don’t pretend you’ll notice the difference.

New Moon – or Twilight 2 as we’re almost definitely going to call it forever simply because it annoys you – doesn’t need to do much to become a box office sensation on the scale of Twilight. All it needs is a rubbishy Paramore soundtrack, endless shots of Robert Pattinson sucking in his cheeks like a boy trying to dislodge a wedge of lamb from between his molars and the occasional subliminal flashcard reading things like ‘Never Have Sex’ and ‘Willies Give You Cancer’.

But we’ll be buggered if Summit Entertainment isn’t doing everything to arse it all up. First it sacked the director of Twilight and replaced her with the man who made The Golden Compass into such a mess, and then it let Robert Pattinson cut his hair – an act so disfiguring that he may as well have driven a bus over his own face.

Worst of all, though, Summit thought about giving the heave-ho to Taylor Lautner, the malnourished-looking pipecleaner who played Jacob Black in Twilight. You see, in New Moon Jacob Black rises from bit-player to lead – and a hulking werewolf of a lead at that – and Summit was concerned that it might be a misstep to let Taylor Lautner continue to play the part since a) he has the charisma of a soggy mattress and b) he has the physique of an oven-withered Gareth Gates action figure.

Taylor Lautner was set to be replaced on New Moon with Michael Copon, a man who still has the charisma of damp bedding but at least looks as if he can open doors without breaking into too much of an exhausted flopsweat. That was until the army of wailing, stomping, unstoppably awful 14-year-old ninnies who make up Twilight‘s fanbase decided to hold their breath until Taylor Lautner was kept on as Jacob Black in New Moon.

And now, as Reuters reports, it seemed like the plan worked:

“The characters in (author) Stephenie (Meyer)’s books go through extraordinary changes of circumstance and also appearance; so it is not surprising that there has been speculation about whether the same actor would portray a character who changes in so many surprising ways throughout the series,” Weitz wrote in a letter posted on Meyer’s website. “But it was my first instinct that Taylor was, is, and should be Jacob.”

Taylor Lautner has much to be thankful for, then. If it wasn’t for the support of all the Twilight fans, he might go down in history as simply ‘Twilight bit-part player Taylor Lautner’. But now he’s been elevated to a lead in New Moon he can be assured that he’ll grow up to be known as ‘hasbeen former childstar Taylor Lautner’. And hooray for that.

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