The original script for added violence to the Twilight novels to make their stories more dramatic and impactful, for the most part, the adaptations stuck close to the original books.
However, this was not always destined to be the case. The first draft of Twilight’s script turned Bella into an action heroine and featured far more bloodshed than the finished movie in an attempt to appeal to a young male audience. This draft also included two major character deaths that didn’t end up making it to the big screen, and Twilight’s movie adaptation was right to keep the characters in question alive.
The deaths of both Bella’s dad Charlie and Edward’s father Carlisle occurred in Twilight’s original script draft and, while the saga always needed more stakes when it came to non-romantic plots, this would have been a step too far. Bella and Edward being a pair of hormone-crazed teens à la Romeo and Juliet was always central to the appeal of the Twilight series in both book and movie form, and killing off their parents in the first movie would have given the saga an unwelcome level of darkness and maturity too early on. It would be difficult for Edward and Bella to focus on being star-crossed lovers if both of them had lost their fathers, and their grief would have made the tone of the franchise much more serious and bleak than the Twilight saga was capable of pulling off.
There were elements of Twilight’s earliest script draft - like the more "bad-ass" action heroine version of Bella - that would have been welcome additions to the movie adaptations. Making the heroine more proactive and less ive could have worked out well for the Twilight movies, but killing off her father to accommodate this shift in characterization would have fundamentally altered Bella’s appeal as a protagonist. Losing Charlie so early in the series would inevitably have made Bella a tougher, less innocent figure than she is in the Twilight movies, thus throwing off her dynamic with Edward. Similarly, losing his adopted father Carlisle would have made Edward a sadder figure and soured his romance with Bella.
Despite the vampire being over a hundred years old as the series starts, Edward and Bella’s romance is an essentially sweet, chaste love story. Hardening the outlooks of both heroes with tragic backstories would have made the Twilight saga far darker and would have left the sequels with nowhere to go, since the lead characters would have no more innocence left to lose. Thus, while it resulted in a less dramatic and impactful story, Twilight cutting the original script’s Carlisle and Charlie deaths was the best choice for the movie adaptation to make.
