A movie being terrible at one thing is hardly an irregular phenomenon, but being supremely bad at everything the project in question wants to be is almost impressively embarrassing. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, you end up with titles like this year’s Firestarter, which ironically and very fittingly went down in a ball of flames.
Marketed as a hybrid of science fiction thriller and atmospheric horror, Keith Thomas’ remake of the 1984 original is undoubtedly one of the worst studio-backed frighteners to come along in a while. On top of that, it’s comfortably one of the weakest remakes in a long time, not to mention its position among the very bottom tier of Stephen King adaptations.
Three-for-three is spectacularly shameful, and you can understand why not even the combined might of the King brand and popular star Zac Efron could prevent Universal from playing it safe and opting for a hybrid release model that saw Firestarter debut simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock.
A 10 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is the stuff of nightmares, even if the 47 percent user rating is almost five times as high. Firestarter has already slipped out of the public consciousness despite only arriving in mid-May, but it’s beginning to enjoy a second wave of infamy on-demand.
As per FlixPatrol, the despicable reinvention of King’s pyrotechnic tale has been rising up the iTunes ranks over the weekend, but we can only cross our fingers in the hope that this is the last time we’ll ever see Firestarter in live-action.