The Twilight movies are unique, in that a monkey could direct them, so long as it was a) cheap and b) fast.

And able to make Robert Pattinson look suitably vacant. But that one’s a given. Anyway, rumour has it that Twilight is about to break from the norm by hiring a director who’s shown signs of basic competency to direct Twilight 3. According to reports, Juan Antonio Bayona of The Orphanage is onboard.

However, according to some other reports, Drew Barrymore is going to direct Twilight 3. Phew, that was close – for a second there we almost wanted to see it.

Although only one of them has been released – and although we resolutely refuse to watch it on the basis that we’re not 14-year-old girls from Idaho, we don’t wear a purity ring and we don’t wish that we had a vampire boyfriend who looks like a crayon face on a plank of wood with an abused cat sellotaped to the top of it – it’s pretty clear that the Twilight movies stick to a pretty rigid formula.

That formula, as if you needed to be told, involves writing, filming, editing and releasing any old piece of crap you can within the space of about six weeks while blindly panicking that today’s fickle youth are going to move onto their next cacky fad at any minute. It’s why Twilight 2 has started filming four months after Twilight 1 was released, and why Twlight 3 is going to come out about six seconds after Twilight 2.

That’s why the Twilight producers, this far, haven’t really bothered to implement much in the way of quality control when it comes to the Twilight directors. Twilight was directed by the woman who made the rubbish nativity film, Twilight 2 is being directed by the man who destroyed The Golden Compass and Twilight 3… well, that’s where things get interesting.

Depending on who you believe, Twilight 3 is either going to be directed by Juan Antonio Bayona – protege of Pan’s Labyrinth mastermind Guillermo Del Toro and director of the surprisingly creepy 2007 Spanish horror The Orphanage – or Drew Barrymore, who many of you will know as either a cocaine-snorting 13-year-old or the actress who only makes terrible romantic comedies these days.

For the sake of our health, let’s assume it’s the former. MTV reports:

Many names have been tossed into the “Eclipse” director chair, but at this point the front-runner to helm the third movie in the “Twilight” saga is Guillermo del Toro protégé Juan Antonio Bayona. Although many have been rumored to direct the film, including “New Moon” director Chris Weitz’s brother, Paul Weitz, at this point Bayona seems like he’s in the lead.

While it’s obviously a shame that Paul Weitz won’t be directing Twilight 3 – especially since they could have got Chris Weitz’s sister’s dentist to do Twilight 4 and dovetailed it off nicely – we’re sure that whoever ends up as the Twilight 3 director will be just fine, so long as they remember the three golden rules of Twilight:

1 - Put Robert Pattinson in all the scenes, even the ones where it’s dramatically important that he doesn’t appear.

2 – Simplify everything: imagine that you’re telling your story to idiots. Literal idiots.

3 - Turn the volume up. The sound of 250 teenage girls wetting themselves at once can drown out a surprising amount of dialogue, you know.

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