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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Sure, it meant Taylor Lautner had to make one film where he barely registered because everyone was creaming themselves dizzy over Robert Pattinson and his ridiculous homeless haircut – but in the Twilight sequels, Jacob is a lead.

Jacob, mind you, not Taylor – according to reports, everyone thinks that Taylor Lautner is too much of a scrawny little pissbag to play Jacob in Twilight 2, so he’s doing everything to save his job. If you need him, he’ll be over there mainlining doughnuts.

The official title for Twilight 2 – which we’re still going to keep calling Twilight 2 out of nothing more than petty spite, by the way – is New Moon. But perhaps a more appropriate title for it would be New Everything, because that seems to be the way that Twilight 2 is going.

First Twilight’s director Catherine Hardwicke was booted off the sequel – because, as we later discovered – she wasn’t Golden Compassy enough – and now it looks like Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob Black in Twilight, might be headed for a similar fate. Where will this end? Admittedly you could quite easily substitute Robert Pattinson for a plank of wood with a repulsively matted whore’s merkin on top of it and nobody would be able to tell the difference, but come on.

The problem seems to be that, in Twilight 2, Jacob Black becomes a sinewy, muscular werewolf. And meanwhile Taylor Lautner looks like a threadbare pipecleaner that’d burst into tears if you stared at it hard enough. We’d say that you could play the xylophone on Taylor Lautner’s ribs, but it’s not true – you could play the toy xylophone on Taylor Lautner’s ribs, but any songs you attempted would make a sound like a lonely pensioner sighing with disappointment because the postman hasn’t come again, and what’d be the point of that? Taylor Lautner is, in short, a weed.

So, with the news that the Twilight producers are keen to switch him with the larger Michael Copon from Scorpion King 2 – an actor who looks exactly like Lautner would if he had 15 snooker balls implanted under his skin – Taylor Lautner has decided to do something about it.

And that’s why, as we speak, Taylor Lautner is in the middle of a Rocky-style training montage that’s a bit lighter on the ‘running up stairs’ part and a little heavier on the ‘having melted cheese poured into his mouth through a funnel for 16 hours a day’ part as People reports:

“I have been working out. I’ve been working out since the day we finished filming Twilight. I just weighed myself today; I’ve put on 19 lbs.,” Lautner told MTV on Wednesday night. And Lautner says he’s meeting this week with director Chris Weitz to make – and show – his case. “I’m guaranteeing Weitz 10 more [pounds] by filming,” the star said at the InStyle-sponsored bash in West Hollywood.

OK, maybe we’ve been a little unkind to Taylor Lautner here – it’s actually completely admirable that he’s met his criticism head-on to keep his place on Twilight 2. And we honestly hope that his sudden 13kg weight gain will convince Chris Weitz to let him star as Jacob Black for the rest of the series.

True, if he does keep his job, Twilight 2 might need a rewrite to make Jacob the first borderline-obese werewolf in history who travels everywhere on a Segway because he gets out of breath even walking to the toilet any more, but the Twilight fans want what they want.

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