There’s nothing wrong with weaponizing a public domain character when that’s pretty much what the figure in question is there for, but you’d have at the very least thought Universal would have realized releasing two Dracula movies four months apart wasn’t the smartest thing to do.
Funnily enough, both of them ended up bombing at the box office, but The Last Voyage of the Demeter has somehow managed to fare even worse than Renfield, which did at least have the novelty factor of seeing Nicolas Cage ham it up as the most famous and iconic vampire there’s ever been.
Director André Øvredal’s adaptation of a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s source novel cratered in theaters almost two weeks ago, earning just $6.5 million against a reported $45 million budget. Even now, it still hasn’t even managed to reach $10 million globally, and things are looking even bleaker.
Initially scheduled to release today in the United Kingdom, The Last Voyage of the Demeter was then removed from the calendar and delayed indefinitely, with distributor eOne shuttering its operations in the country in the wake of parent company Hasbro’s sale to Lionsgate pinpointed as the problem.
Reliance Entertainment have also taken the single-location terror off the board in India, too, and as of yet there’s no word on when – or if – it’ll be released at all in either nation. At this stage, Universal might be best off shunting it onto digital and VOD as soon as possible, because there’s always an appetite for horror in the home, and it’s already been made clear that big screen audiences simply aren’t interested in Demeter.
