After Catherine Hardwicke left Twilight 2 for whatever reason, its studio needed to think extremely carefully about her replacement.

After all, the Twilight 2 director would need to be adept at dealing with teenagers, understanding the romantic pull of the source text and – most importantly – be able to follow the lead of the first movie by creating an expansive fantasy book adaptation that ends up as a horribly unintelligible mess that nobody could ever genuinely be proud of.

And that’s why the director of Twilight 2 has been announced as Chris Weitz, the director of The Golden Compass. Clever move, movie studio, clever move.

Everyone was a little bit stunned when it was announced that Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke wasn’t going to direct Twilight 2, not least Catherine Hardwicke herself, we’d imagine. Nobody knows for sure why Hardwicke was moved off the Twilight sequel, but it appears that it could be one of the following:

1 - Catherine Hardwicke wanted some preparation time for Twilight 2 and the studio just wanted it pumped out as quickly as possible before the fad blows over.

2 - The success of Twilight sent Catherine Hardwicke into the raging depths of egomania, and she refused to direct the sequel unless she was taken to and from the set in a golden Cinderella carriage and the movie was renamed Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight 2.

3 - Catherine Hardwicke has breasts and a vagina, which is generally looked down upon in Hollywood.

But, for whatever reason, it left an empty director’s chair on the Twilight 2 set, and one that needed to be filled before someone else decided to adapt a wishy-washy conservative doctrine disguised as a teenage fantasy epic into a movie and stole its glory. And that meant that Twilight‘s studio Summit Entertainment couldn’t dilly-dally.

It had to pick a new director fast. Any director. Even if that director had recently made a notoriously bad movie adaptation of a famous children’s fantasy book and was therefore probably the least qualified movie director on the face of the planet to take it on. Which is just as well, because it’s picked Chris Weitz to direct Twilight 2, and he directed The Golden Compass, for God’s sake. The Hollywood Reporter reports:

Chris Weitz has been tapped to helm “New Moon,” the sequel to Summit Entertainment’s vampire breakout “Twilight.” [Stephenie] Meyer penned a letter that sought to calm fans nervous about the midstream switch. “I’m sad that Catherine is not continuing on with us for ‘New Moon,’ she wrote in a letter on her Web site, but then noted that, with Weitz: “Torches and pitchforks aren’t going to be necessary.”

Oh come on, Stephanie Meyer, all this public hand-wringing really isn’t necessary – you know as well as we do that Twilight 2 could be about nothing more than Robert Pattinson trimming his nasal hair and all your ridiculous female 14-year-old fans would scream themselves hoarse and lose all control of their bladders by the middle of the first act.

Anyway, even though he’s the director of a notoriously underperforming children’s fantasy book, we’re positive that Chris Weitz will be a perfect director for Twilight 2. Having co-directed American Pie with his brother, Chris Weitz knows teenagers inside out, and therefore there’s bound to be a scene of Kirsten Stewart whacking herself off with a musical instrument in it somewhere.

And Chris Weitz will obviously get the most out of Twilight 2‘s young cast – especially Robert Pattinson. Weitz has worked with Nicole Kidman, remember, so he’s well-experienced when it comes to directing charisma-free actors who only have one facial expression but are still somehow bewilderingly thought of as attractive.

Most of all, though, we can totally see the logic in letting Chris Weitz direct Twilight 2. Look at it this way – if he can take a children’s book that’s actually quite good and turn it into a pointless car-crash of a movie that everyone hates, then he should be able to take a rubbishy car-crash book and turn it into something quite good.

That’s how it works, right?

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Twilight is well-known for three things: 1) it’s popular, 2) it’s rubbish and 3) ooh Robert Pattinson! He’s so dreamy!

The first one of these is undoubtedly a good thing, and the third one at least distracts from the nagging sensation that Robert Pattinson is basically an even-less charismatic Orlando Bloom with better hair, but the second one? That could well be a problem.

So, to try and make Twilight 2 less rubbish, it’s been announced that Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke has been bumped out of the way to let someone else have a bash at the sequel. Which is, um, news. We think.

Twilight – the book and movie series that makes people sorry they ever slagged off Harry Potter – can’t be stopped at the moment. It’s still riding high at the box office, its Fisher Price Columbine soundtrack is still making 14-year-old girls feel deeper than they actually are and Twilight star Robert Pattinson is still the heart-throb pin-up of the moment – a role he’ll enjoy until he goes bald and everyone realises that his skull is shaped like seven spanners in a deflated balloon.

However, if there’s one thing that can be said about Twilight, it’s that it was rubbish. Unstoppably, majestically rubbish. It didn’t matter, of course – cinema ushers still have to scrub the 14-year-old urine out of the seats after every showing – but that’s mainly because nobody has ever invented a 14-year-old girl who wasn’t an idiot.

Metacritic gave Twilight 56%, while Rottentomatoes was slightly less forgiving, awarding it 55% – the same as huge hits like Vacancy and Ocean’s Twelve – and that was no good for Twilight‘s studio. They didn’t want to make a hokey abstinence-promoting emo film about nothing – they wanted to make art.

So who should Twilight’s rubbishness be blamed on? The actors? Stephenie Meyer, the woman who wrote the poxy thing to begin with? The cloth-eared dickface who decided to put Paramore on the Twilight soundtrack? No. It looks like the blame is being laid at the feet of Catherine Hardwicke, Twilight‘s director.

Despite being the woman who, just a few short weeks ago, gleefully announced Twilight 2 to the world, it’s just been revealed that the movie has been snatched away from Hardwicke and will be directed by someone else. Reuters reports:

Hardwicke had until recently been thought a candidate to direct the sequel but word began to circulate in the industry that her relationship with series producer Summit Entertainment has not always been smooth. On Sunday, Summit confirmed that Hardwicke would not direct the film, saying in a statement that its plans to release the film in late 2009 or early 2010 did not mesh with Hardwicke’s required prep time.

OK, we take back all that stuff about art. It seems like Catherine Hardwicke has been shoved out of the way of Twilight 2 because she wants to take her time and make the adaptation the best it can be, while Summit is just crapping itself about getting all four Twilight movies released before its audience hits 20 and suddenly realises what an unmitigated pile of nonsense the whole thing is.

So who’s going to direct Twilight 2? Well, given the time constraints, the pro-religious subtext, the fact that Catherine Hardwicke directed a movie about baby Jesus once and the way that only someone really desperate for work would seriously consider directing it, there’s only really one option.

You heard us. The ‘Mel Gibson for Twilight 2‘ campaign starts here.

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