Adapting any remotely popular YA literary trilogy with a dystopian bent was all the rage for close to a decade, but none of them tanked anywhere near as hard as Mortal Engines, which ranks as one of the biggest box office bombs in history.
With a production budget rumored to be hovering around the $150 million mark, director Christian Rivers’ feature-length debut boasted impressive pedigree behind the camera thanks to the producorial and writing credits attributed to The Lord of the Rings dream team of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens, but calling it a disaster would be an understatement.
Once marketing and distribution costs were factored in, a measly theatrical gross of only $83 million is estimated to have seen Mortal Engines wind up an eye-watering $175 million in the red. A 26 percent Rotten Tomatoes score rubbed further salt into the wounds, and now folks on Reddit are once more piling in to blast the bungled fantasy epic in the harshest of terms.
The visuals are admittedly very nice to look at, which was to be expected given Rivers’ background as a longtime collaborator of Jackson and Weta who won an Academy Award for his contributions to King Kong. However, everything else about Mortal Engines is painfully lacking, but at least its status as a gargantuan financial failure has ensured it’ll live on in the history books, albeit for the most unwanted of reasons.
It may have one or two fans dotted around, but for the most part, it was a folly on a catastrophic scale.
