The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones – Movie Review

Ivy, our friend, and I saw The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones today!! Here's what I thought:

The first half of the movie was exactly true to the book, which is always good. The second half varied a little from the book, but nothing huge that I have to rant about.

Lily Collins was very good as Clary. There wasn't any other standouts in the rest of the cast, but no one was absolutely horrible either.

The movie tried the best it could, but it couldn't fix the usual problems of converting books to movies: moving too fast due to limited time, inability to see inside the characters' heads, etc.

All in all, it was a pretty good movie.

Final score: 9.1 out of 10

Now, it's been confirmed that City of Ashes, the sequel, will be adapted into a movie. Production will start on September 23, and the movie will premiere somewhere in 2014. However, there may be a possiblity that the franchise will stop there. Why, you ask? Because City of Bones did awful in theaters. Awful.

It's common sense that hit movies get sequels. From what I know about the movie business (not a lot, but enough), you become a "hit" if you end up making double your budget in ticket sales. City of Bones's budget was $60 million. After a week in movie theaters, it's made just below $28 million worldwide. That's not good. It needs three more weeks exactly like that to be at hit status, and that's definitely not going to happen. Movies get nowhere near as much money in the weeks after the first week. So CoB probably will earn enough ticket sales to cover its budget, it most likely won't be a hit by movie terms. Basically, City of Ashes needs to do better than CoB for the future of the franchise to be safe.

A few random thoughts:

• The only thing we know about the City of Ashes movie is that Sigourney Weaver was cast in it. I don't know what role, and I don't care to know because it's taking forever for my library to get the book!!!!! Google it if you're interested.

• Did you know that critics hated the movie?? They thought it was awful! It's so weird; they didn't hate Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters as much and I thought this was better!!

• There's an app that has a game based on the movie. It's called "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" and I'm going to download it right now!

• Can you believe that when Cassandra Clare was first going to movie studios looking for someone to sell the rights to, she was told that no one wanted to see a young adult movie with a girl lead? I mean, seriously???

– Nick