Twilight Product Placement Blood Bath

As Brandchannel has noted, the Twilight saga is a product placement monster, inspiring such wild attention to starring brands that lawsuits have been filed. The series is also a monster when it comes to tracking product placement, creating a wild dilemma we haven't seen since the Apple “placement” in Iron Man 2. Visit Brandcameo to see a breakdown of all the products seen in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, the franchise's latest installment and this week's #1 movie at the box office.

But first, a little background on Apple and Twilight. The story of Apple’s role in the Twilight films is an interesting one when juxtaposed with the film’s of other best-known brands, such as Jeep, Porsche, Mercedes and Volvo, raising the question of just whether or not the Apple brand may be clandestinely forcing its way into film roles.

While auto brands make heavy appearances in the Twilight books (Volvo is mentioned 16 times in the original book and six times in Eclipse), Apple products do not. It was in the transition from the book to the screen that producers decided to add the Apple products. Furthermore, the placement of Apple products was not a meaningless fleshing out of the Twilight world for the screen; it was in direct contrast to the original text.

For example, one passage in the book discussing characters and cars reads, “It was a common thing to see a Mercedes or Porsche in the student lot. The nicest car here was [Edward’s] shiny Volvo.” So the placements of the Volvo and Porsche, etc. in the film (especially Edward’s Volvo) follow with the book. Meanwhile, a passage from the book about Bella’s computer reads “The desk now held a second-hand computer.”

In fact, in other parts of the Twilight series of books Bella complains about the computer’s age and that it is riddled with “pop-up ads.” Her first mention of the old computer in the first Twilight book is a plot point demonstrating just how much her father has made an effort to prepare his home for her. Yet, in the filmed versions, Bella does her online research on a $1,000 Macbook.

Given the filmmakers' close adherence to the rest of the source material, this raises the question of just how the Apple notebook landed its role—and how Twilight's producers took a bite of Apple.

Here's a look at how Twilight showcased Volvo's XC60: