For many of its actors, the Twilight series has become a meal ticket-- no one had heard of Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson, Cam Gigandet etc. before they got cast as vampires and werewolves. But apparently Rachelle Lefevre will be paying the bills from elsewhere. The actress playing evil vampire Victoria in the first two films will be moving on to other projects, and Bryce Dallas Howard will be taking her place.

The casting seems like a strange move for the Twilight franchise, which has hired a bunch of minor actors and signed them into four-movie projects for presumably no money. Howard, though not as big a name as she was back in the Village days, is fairly well-known in her own right. Is she just such a big Twilight fan that she was willing to take the gig for no money? Or did Terminator: Salvation hurt her career more than we thought?

Lefevre recently signed on to be part of the Paul Giamatti comedy Barney's Version, which starts filming in August at the same time as the next Twilight film, Eclipse. I guess Lefevre figured it was time to move on to something a little more serious. I like Howard a lot, and look forward to seeing her in pretty much anything; apparently in the third film she'll get a chance to be a pretty big villain. I guess at next year's Comic Con we might get a chance to see teenage girls screaming at Bryce Dallas Howard. It's a Twilight rite of passage.