Pattinson reizinho
Two actors went shirtless in New Moon. One gained 30 pounds of real muscle. One painted his abs on and raided the minibar for chocolate. Their careers went in opposite directions, and not the way you'd guess.
Taylor Lautner got fired from the role of Jacob, then won it back by adding roughly 30 pounds of muscle for the sequel. By 2010 he was the highest-paid teen actor in Hollywood. He did everything a franchise asks a young star to do, and he did it harder than anyone.
Pattinson went the other way. He mocked the films in nearly every interview, joked that his abs were fake, and treated the whole production like a paycheck he was slightly embarrassed to cash. The paycheck was real: about $2.5M for the first film, around $12M for New Moon, roughly $41M apiece for the two Breaking Dawn movies. Call it $67M out of the saga.
Then he spent it on a plan nobody understood at the time. For eight years after Twilight he turned down every franchise and every studio tentpole. Not one film he made in that window cleared $20M at the box office. By design. He took Twilight-level fame and quietly burned it to the ground, working with Cronenberg, the Safdie brothers, Claire Denis, and Robert Eggers on movies built for critics and nobody else.
The part nobody saw coming: it worked. Good Time and The Lighthouse rebuilt him as a serious actor. Then he walked back into the exact thing he'd spent a decade avoiding and played Batman in a film that grossed $772M worldwide. He's been on a run of $100M movies ever since, Mickey 17 included, all on his terms.
Lautner played the franchise game perfectly, and the franchise ended. Pattinson treated the franchise like a hostage situation and used the ransom to fund a completely different career.
He barely prepared for the shirtless scene everyone still screenshots. It bankrolled the most respected acting career anyone got out of that entire franchise.