Harry Potter has bitten the dust; the Twilight Saga is staggering to a close. While the film industry gets used to the idea that two of its biggest cash cows will no longer be delivering, 2012 marks the moment that a clutch of very rich, very famous actors, all in their late teens and early 20s, will be let loose on the cinematic world, to run their careers as they like.
Three of the most bankable names on the planet are Potter graduates: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint. Another three are from Twilight: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner. The Potter kids have been locked into their series for longer, and have had to negotiate a very public adolescence.
Radcliffe may be a lantern-jawed 22-year-old leading man, and Watson a 21-year-old fashion maven, but the memory of those schoolkid personas – owlish and goody-two-shoes respectively – will stick around for ever.
In a side-projectish way, some have already taken their baby steps. Radcliffe appeared in an Australian indie, December Boys; Stewart played Joan Jett in a movie about girl-rockers the Runaways; and Watson had a small role in My Week with Marilyn.
But the serious business lies ahead. This year, Radcliffe plays the lead in the ghost story The Woman in Black (released 10 February), a high-profile Hammer film directed by James "Eden Lake" Watkin, with a script by Jane "Kick-Ass" Goldman. Watson, meanwhile, looks to be banking on the putatively hip, John Malkovich-co-produced The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Grint isn't yet in the same upscale bracket, but it means he can take a few risks on edgier stuff, and he's currently signed to a biopic of Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards. The final Twilight instalment Breaking Dawn: Part 2 screens in November. In the meantime, Stewart's big vehicle is Snow White and the Huntsman (released 1 June), an action-movie twist on the traditional tale (not a million miles away from the retooled gothic of Twilight). Lautner – the series' beefcake – is gunning for similar status, even if last September's Abduction was a flop; he's used his Twilight cash to sign up Gus Van Sant, for an as-yet secret project.
Arguably, it's Pattinson who looks to be making the most interesting moves. At 25, he's the oldest, and cut his teeth as Cedric Diggory in the Potter films. In the past he has demonstrated a literary/artistic bent (he played Salvador Dalí in his last pre-Twilight film, Little Ashes), and he's going down that road again next year, with Bel Ami (released 2 March), an adaptation of the Maupassant novel. Later in the year we should be getting Cosmopolis, another literary adaptation (of Don DeLillo's 2003 novel), which has Pattinson as a mega-rich asset manager stuck in a limo for 24 hours. The director is David Cronenberg, so chances are this will be pretty special.
