By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2012
In August 2012 FishbowlLA dissected a disagreement between The Hollywood Reporter and E! News over a single verb — whether Kristen Stewart had been ‘dropped’ from a Snow White and the Huntsman sequel.
Then
The Hollywood Reporter, in a story by Kim Masters and Borys Kit, reported that Stewart had been dropped from Universal’s sequel plans. E! News’s Marc Malkin pushed back, arguing that Stewart had never been contractually attached to a follow-up in the first place — and so could not be ‘dropped’ from it.
Malkin’s account, tied to an earlier item of his own, said the project was being retooled around Chris Hemsworth’s Huntsman and that a new writer was being brought in to replace David Koepp, but that no cast attachment had ever existed to undo.
FishbowlLA’s sharpest observation was internal to the THR story: the headline blared ‘Dropped,’ while the article text more cautiously said Stewart ‘will not be invited to return.’ The post wondered aloud whether the dispute was really a case of an overly aggressive headline. Updates piled on — the LA Times weighed in, Universal co-chairman Donna Langley called reports of a drop ‘false,’ and Masters followed with an analysis insisting Universal held an option on Stewart.
Now
The film resolved the argument by simply moving on without her. The follow-up emerged in 2016 as The Huntsman: Winter’s War, built around Chris Hemsworth and adding Emily Blunt and Jessica Chastain — a project that, as Malkin had suggested, never required Stewart at all.
Kristen Stewart used the years after the Twilight and Snow White era to remake her career on her own terms, moving decisively into auteur-driven independent film and earning a 2022 Best Actress nomination for Spencer, as well as stepping behind the camera as a director.
The headline-versus-text gap FishbowlLA isolated has only grown more relevant. As coverage moved to social feeds, the headline frequently became the entire story a reader absorbed — making the 2012 question of whether a too-strong headline had outrun its own article an unusually durable piece of media criticism.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.