E! Talks To Melissa Rosenberg

If Channing Tatum hasn’t read the Twilight books, he may want to start.

At least one very important person in the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire love story thinks Tatum would be perfect to play bad-boy vampire Riley in Eclipse, the third in the four-book series.

“There’s a very big battle at the end with Riley, and I think Channing would do that so well,” Twilight and New Moon screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who is currently writing the Eclipse script, told us this weekend at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival benefit for the Writers Guild Foundation.

“And there are some complexities to that character," she adds. "He really is tragic. He’s a puppet for Victoria [bad-girl vampire played by Rachelle Lefevre]. So he has to break your heart a little bit at the end when he realizes that she doesn’t want him. Channing could do that beautifully.”

Rosenberg also confirmed some good news for Robert Pattinson fans...

Even though Edward Cullen may not be in the New Moon novel as much as he is in the others, she promised we’ll be seeing plenty of the Brit actor in the flick, which is currently shooting in Vancouver with director Chris Weitz.

“In the book, he’s actually an enormous presence in [Bella’s] mind,” Rosenberg said. “He’s so present in her mind throughout the entire center of the book, so we really played off that, and it kept him alive in a slightly different way, but fans will feel it’s true to the book. You can’t have a Twilight without Rob Pattinson.”

And Rosenberg says you also can’t have a Twilight movie with anything more adult than a PG-13 rating. She has yet to be hired to write the script for the fourth, Breaking Dawn, but she thinks it’s safe to assume the book’s more graphic violent scenes will be tailored to keep it accessible for Twilight’s teen moviegoing audience.

“Our fans are in the PG age range, and I don’t feel a big necessity to see violence, and to see gore,” Rosenberg said. “I don’t need to see that. This whole series is more about their relationship. It’s not about the gore. I mean, there are some scary and special elements to it, but the series is really about relationships and coming of age and owning one’s power.”