The Twilight phenomenon has now been over for nearly a year, and Kristen Stewart finds herself the best positioned of the three main leads. (Though doing better than Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson right now is not exactly the highest bar to clear.) That said, she’s safely entrenched in a second successful franchise, after Snow White and the Huntsman made nearly $400 million worldwide last year, and a sequel is in the works for 2015.
Which is not to say life is easy for Stewart. There was that whole "making out with her married director" gossip explosion from last year, a scandal ill-suited for a star already so awkward in the spotlight. Because of this blowup, it is not surprising that her gossip value is a perfect ten, while her likability bottoms out at 30, ten percentage points lower than it was last year. (The most common E-Score adjectives used to describe her: "overexposed, cold.") Her studio value is a middling 5.75, and it’s not an encouraging sign that at one and it’s not an encouraging sign that at one point, Universal was just going to make the Snow White sequel about the Huntsman, ditching the female lead of the franchise. (If Melissa McCarthy cheated with her Identity Thief director, there’s no way anyone would consider making Identity Thief 2without her.) Whether Stewart is the main draw for Snow White or not, she’s still using it as a strong paycheck to give her the freedom to do more nuanced projects: Coming up, she has the Gitmo drama Camp X-Ray and Sils Maria, the English-language directing debut of Oliver Assayas. Her previous small-scale dramas have mostly fizzled out (On the Road, The Runaways), but her continued casting by these directors says a lot.
