Mortal Engines, a movie about a post-apocalyptic world where mobile cities scour the earth gobbling up smaller towns to fuel their engines, opened in U.S. theaters this weekend to lackluster reviews. It sounds like the viewing public didn’t think much of it either; it made only $7.5 million against a budget of $100 million, plus marketing and distribution costs. I know it’s only been one weekend, but very few movies pick up steam the longer they hang around, particularly when they don’t make much of a splash in the first place. Per Variety, Mortal Engines has made more money globally — $42 million to date — but still, this is bad enough that we can safely call the movie a bomb.
Mortal Engines was written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the same team behind Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and directed by Jackson protege Christian Rivers. For people hoping for the second coming of The Lord of the Rings, this is a disappointment. According to Variety, some in the industry estimate that Mortal Engines could lose $100 million for Universal, which otherwise had a pretty good year with movies like Halloween, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Grinch.
The movie is based on the first of four novels by Philip Reeve. It belongs to that most maligned of genres: young adult fiction, which had a heyday with movies like Twilight and The Hunger Games a few years back but has kind of fizzled out now. “Everybody is having a tough go trying to appeal to that YA marketplace,” said Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “It’s a generation gap between studios and what they think young audiences like. TV is getting it right, and movies aren’t.”
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YA movie series are all about sequels, but with this kind of return, there’s not much chance Mortal Engines will get a follow-up. The one chance it has left is China, where it has yet to open. The Chinese market is huge and has been known to save the odd stateside bomb. For example, in 2016, Warcraft opened to yawns from American audiences, earning only $47 million against a $160 million budget. But it China, it raked in $213 million, making it profitable. If you’re a Mortal Engines fan, first of all, good for you for going against the grain, and second of all, China is your only hope.
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