As far as feature-length directorial debuts go, Florian Sigl showed no shortage of ambition when he made the jump from commercials to movies with The Magic Flute.
On paper, an effects-heavy hybrid of fantasy, romance, and musical based on Mozart’s 1791 opera of the same name that featured Shadow and Bone breakout Jack Wolfe, Game of Thrones veteran Iwan Rheon, and Academy Award-winning Amadeus star F. Murray Abraham in a sly piece of meta casting – which was executive produced by Independence Day‘s Roland Emmerich – sounds like a lot to take in.
It very much was, and it wasn’t all that surprising in the slightest that modern-day audiences didn’t seem to have much interest in such a uniquely unusual slice of genre-bending escapism, with The Magic Flute only managing to scrape together a shade over $236,000 at the box office, an almost inevitable outcome seeing as there wasn’t really any sort of target audience in mind.
It’s often a visual treat, though, and while it doesn’t quite pull off whatever it is that everyone is aiming for, the passion the creative team has for the source material is evident in almost every frame. Having come and gone without making a splash towards the end of last year, The Magic Flute has now been singing from a very familiar songbook by embarking on a streaming comeback.
Per FlixPatrol, the fascinatingly failed experimental experience has cracked the most-watched charts on both iTunes and Rakuten this week, so maybe viewers are finally coming around to its particular charms.
Published: May 4, 2023 11:21 am