If you could predict a franchise’s success based entirely on the complexion of its cast, then Beautiful Creatures would have comfortably completed its intended four-film arc.
Warner Bros. snapped up the rights to the Caster Chronicles quartet at the height of the YA craze, and assembled a ludicrously stacked ensemble to bring the first installment to life. Unfortunately, nobody gave a damn, and the $60 million romantic Gothic fantasy barely recouped its budget from theaters in the face of tepid reviews from critics, audiences, and fans of the source material alike, ending the would-be franchise at the first hurdle.
It’s not even exaggerating to say that Beautiful Creatures might have just crammed more talent into one feature than the entirety of the short-lived phenomenon for turning any mildly popular book saga into a prospective big screen money-spinner, looking at what they’ve achieve before and since.
You’ve got Academy Award winners Jeremy Irons, Viola Davis, and Emma Thompson providing the gravitas alongside three-time Emmy winner Margot Martindale, with future two-time Golden Globe victor Rachel Brosnahan just one of the rising stars recruited alongside Alden Ehrenreich, Emmy Rossum, Alice Englert, Thomas Mann, Zoey Deutch, Tiffany Boone, and Kyle Gallner.
All of that esteem proved to be for nothing in the end, with Beautiful Creatures imploding as soon as it hit the big screen and killing the entire operation stone dead. Even flops have a funny way of circling back around on streaming, though, with FlixPatrol revealing that Max subscribers have found themselves suddenly drawn to the entirely forgettable failure in great enough numbers to make it one of the platform’s biggest hits.
